All the wrong innovation

This is even truer in the service sector that isn't dominated by patentable discoveries or 'things'. In 2010-11 the service sector made up 76% of Australian employment and contributed about 58% of GDP. So invisible innovation here really matters.

What's worse is that while governments of all stripes throw grant money at universities and anything to do with sexy areas such as 'cloud' or 'technology', on almost every other front they stymie innovation that people can actually execute. The clearest problem here lies with workplace relations and changed work processes. I mention only the MUA and containers per hour in 1998 and 2012, and the facts that asking a public servant to work 5 days a week is 'mentally damaging', or that telling someone their work isn't up to scratch is now compensable as bullying (overturned 2 years later).

But it's more. It's the overriding policy mindset that innovation is done by organisations when they produce something new...a view stimulated by the reliance on inadequate proxy measures. Worse, it's a view that supports a centralised, bureaucratic, managed and quasi-socialist view of innovation policy. We just need to increase R&D spending; force companies to give staff innovation time; build centres of excellence; increase IT education spending; provide the infrastructure; cash and tax subsidise.

It's the same sort of view that thinks a University Masters in Innovation is a good idea.

As opposed to? The fact is that innovation often requires individuals to flee organisations for the freedom necessary to innovate. That more innovation occurs in detailed, daily tweaking than in grandiose R&D. That decades-long, major innovation often has more need of the tenacity of a fixated entrepreneur, than the disinterested investigation of an academic, or the rushed 2 day Innovation Sprint of the salaryman in an "Innovation Leading company".

And governments, despite all their sound and fury about innovation, continue to support and enlarge regulation that makes tweaking-style innovation risky or illegal (check Workplace Relations laws, product standards and Local Government planning details before you laugh). They either mandate or support workplace norms that hamstring innovative decision-making, particularly in the public service and unionised companies. And government action in favour of incumbents makes major innovation - industry-disruptive change - so expensive and risky that it only appeals to the most committed and pathological of entrepreneurs.

And so, all those people with some entrepreneurial spirit but more common sense see a lifetime as a corporate or public sector insider as a better option. All that energy and potential is lost.

Innovation policy? Lipstick on a pig.