AEEMA wants an innovation policy

Stuart Corner
Monday, 29 October 2007 08:31

IT Policy - Regulation

AEEMA says Australia needs to ramp up its focus on innovation, as opposed to research, and has called for whichever party is returned in the next election to implement a broad-based innovation policy.

AEEMA CEO, Angus Robinson, says that Australia has not made any gains in innovative capacity over the past decade. "While innovation is the key to lifting productivity, living standards and competitiveness, it is poorly understood in Australia, and too closely coupled with research." His comments co-incide with publication of an opinion piece in the Financial Review from Roy Green, dean of the Macquarie Graduate School of Management making a very similar argument.

Robinson argues that "Innovation is not invention...Innovation is multi-dimensional, encompassing a vast array of activities in the whole supply chain: identification of an opportunity, designing and implementing a solution and marketing its uptake. The most effective innovation involves a process of the...integration of existing knowledge in new and inventive ways."

He says that Australia undertakes sufficient pure and strategic research, but lacks the design and management skills to get that knowledge into international markets, and that government policy has failed to redress the balance. "In recent years, policy settings have treated innovation too closely as just research; the latter phases of innovation (design, manufacture and marketing) are arguably more vital to national economic and productivity outcomes."

He says there is now "a strident call from industry and business for the need to elevate the whole innovation process to the national priority agenda, with a national framework to coordinate the efforts of government, business and research institutions."