Innovation: practice makes perfect

Further, we lock ourselves into a vicious circle in which our most talented young scientists and engineers seek employment offshore - thus lessening the likelihood of future invention. If all a bright young technology graduate can look forward to is a career as a spec writer for an on-shore purchasing department, then she or he will head overseas.

Entrepreneurial business success more often than not comes from “listening to the technology”, as Caltech researcher and Silicon Valley legend Carver Mead famously expressed it. In other words, letting the science lead the way.

The problem is, so many of our business leaders are technologically illiterate. Managers of Australian-owned companies in general have a resistance to wanting to know anything about an underlying technology. But there are some systems where it’s important to understand the underlying technology, particularly at the early stage.

Wireless sensor networks are an example. It’s important to know that certain wireless technologies have a long range and others have a short range. Some will only work within a 10 ft radius, others within a building, and others within an entire cell that is kilometres wide. It’s important to know how much power is consumed. If we don’t understand this, our decision making will be adversely affected.

Similarly, managers wanting to make a strategic decision about what technology to adopt in, say, supply chain management very often relegate the decision making to the people who understand the “bits and bytes”. Australian executives often say that there is no need to understand how technology works. However, certain key decisions involve understanding the technology. Letting the science lead the way is standard practice in the US, but countries that we should be on a par with do it too, such as Sweden and Finland, who rank way above us in growth competitiveness - as do Denmark, Taiwan, Singapore, Switzerland, Iceland and Norway (National Innovation Systems: Finland, Sweden & Australia compared, Roos, Fernstrom & Gupta).

Australian business expenditure on R&D as a share of GDP is significantly lower than the OECD average. In 1998-99, for example, our total expenditure on R&D was around $8.8 billion - only 16.5 per cent more than IBM’s expenditure on R&D and engineering.

We also need to get smart when it comes to high-tech or entrepreneurial marketing - a key link in the innovation cycle that ensures brilliant inventions and technological breakthroughs benefit the public.

In Australia we are deficient in the art and skill of high-tech marketing principally because we are a sales channel for the multinationals. This means that the vast majority of product development and product definition, and its associated marketing - matching the right customers with the right product at the right time - takes place in the US or Europe.

Many multi-nationals make it a rule that we in Australia are not even allowed to suggest ideas for new products, and that all products have to be conceived and developed back at headquarters overseas. We finally get in on the act when it comes to lubricating the local sales channels.

These are just some areas in which we fall down in innovation practice. It is up to educators, governments, business people and others to help to change our culture from the bottom up.