Aussie innovation: Four cultural changes to support ideas

Cultural change 3 – purchasing from NGEs

Some efforts are being made within governments to encourage NGE engagement as suppliers to government but these are still well short of facilitating government as an evangelist customer.

We need to adopt the SBIR (US Small Business Innovation Research agency) mentality and roll out programs that remove the departmental financial and staff personal risk that goes with being a developmental customer.

To achieve this end, we need to develop a forum for sharing NGE experiences in this pursuit of government as a customer, and especially as a development customer.

This can be added to the list of desirable system resources.

On the other side, government would benefit greatly to engage with the innovation commercialisation community as background to its policy formulations to understand what the future might, or could, look like across education, health, safety and social dimensions.

Cultural change 4 – big business and NGEs

A simple change is proposed in the context of innovation commercialisation and big business.

We should encourage every listed company to include in their annual report:

• The percentage of the past year’s revenue that came from new products, services or markets, and their goals for the coming year;

• The percentage of their cost of goods sold, and services sourced, that came from NGEs, and it would be useful here to provide one story about the value add of this NGE product or service;

• A description of the partnerships and collaborations operating during the year past, and the year coming, to develop innovative solutions to existing problems or productivity opportunities.

• We should encourage our institutional investors to include such practices within their expectations for good governance.

What we know in many areas of social policy is that it is behavioural change that leads attitude change.

It can be done

These actions taken together would transform our economy from one based on depleting resources into a sustainable economy growing from sustainable innovative intelligence and implementation capacity.

The exciting aspect of the proposals is that in the context of our circumstances as a country of only 22 million people:

• This is an Australian solution to Australian conditions and circumstances. There is no point importing a system developed within a different economic and cultural setting.

• This cost of developing this National Innovation Infrastructure, being spread among the states and the Commonwealth, is readily affordable;

• Not only can it be done, but also it could be up and running within 12 months if we just make the commitment.

The critical question is will we have the vision and courage to accept the challenge to build an economy whose growth is extracted from both mines and minds.