Tuesday 12 December 2006
The Honourable John Brumby, Victorian Minister for Innovation
The last of three innovation summits led by UQ Business School's Mark Dodgson and Melbourne industry consultant Terry Cutler was held in Melbourne last week.
Opened by influential Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey, the event also featured the Victorian Minister for Innovation, The Honourable John Brumby, the ABC's Alan Kohler and the Productivity Commission's Mike Woods.
Launched on 2 November, the Productivity Commission's draft report reviewing public support for science and innovation came in for some thoughtful criticism - as well as earning a sigh of relief from some speakers including Australian Private Equity & Venture Capital Association Ltd (AVCAL) CEO Dr Katherine Woodthorpe.
Dodgson said the Productivity Commission's report and the rash of innovation statements released recently by bodies from the Australian Business Foundation and Deloitte to the New South Wales Government was encouraging evidence that the innovation issue was gathering momentum and becoming mainstream.
Co-convenor Cutler said, "Geoffrey Blainey's erudite introduction encouraged us to see innovation as a mainstream factor in Australia's economic development - with ingenuity a fundamental feature of the Australian character - while BRW's Managing Editor Peter Roberts described innovation policy as the new industry policy."
Internationally renowned UK academics Professor Alan Hughes (Cambridge University) and Professor John Bessant (Imperial College London), Deloitte Consulting Managing Partner Gerhard Vorster, and the Australian Business Foundation's CEO Narelle Kennedy also featured in the line-up of high profile speakers.
Dodgson and Cutler embraced the philosophy of open innovation in designing the series of Innovation Summits - methodically seeking and incorporating feedback from all participants throughout the process. The results will be published in a Manifesto for an Innovative Australia.
UQ Business School MBA students spent the day combing the audience for their written comments and questions, progressively feeding them to session chairs. These were then added to the mass of material generated through the day - including the working lunch - and wrestled into shape for the final summing up by Cutler.
Dodgson said innovation was changing from a closed, top-down system to a more open-ended, consumer-driven process.
He said, "In the past, much innovation has been generated on the supply side and then pushed out into the market.
"What we're starting to see is innovation generated on the demand side by consumers and then picked up and adopted by manufacturers.
"With the innovation summits, we wanted to avoid identifying some people as 'experts' who just talked at an audience.
"Our aim was to harness the intellectual capital in the room and deeply engage participants in the process."
And it seems to have worked. According to Dodgson and Cutler, the quality of input from participants has been outstanding and will continue into next year with the formation of an Innovation Forum to continue to progress the innovation leadership agenda.
The Innovation Summits 2006 were sponsored by BRW, Deloitte, and the Victorian Government.
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