There is a pervasive Australian myth that goes something like this: innovations come from brilliant scientists who pass on their discoveries to grateful businessmen and women and, eventually, the consumer. This linear progression does occur, but is a rarity compared to the real source of Australian innovation - the entrepreneur.
The world's stock of science and technology is increasing at a rapid rate and, in fact, there is already enough of it around to fuel a number of industrial revolutions. What is in short supply are the people who can assemble technologies and ideas into a coherent business plan, raise the finance and assemble the team that can turn all these inputs into something consumers value - in short, into an innovative product or service.
Our much celebrated technology business successes - Cochlear and ResMed illustrate the point.
While the bionic ear hearing implant was a brilliant idea of Professor Graeme Clarke. it was the late Paul Trainor who patiently incubated the immature Cochlear business inside his Telectronics heart pacemaker business. Peter Farrell did a similar job with ResMed, creating a global business around the ideas of Professor Colin Sullivan.
Few business successes are based on such obviously good ideas. Take many of the recent crop of internet successes - they are more usually novel customer-focused business systems and processes based on well understood communications technologies. These are the work of entrepreneurs.
Of course a great business has to have some sort of inspiration. But the vast majority of effort and expense begins once the idea is formulated. Most of the many scientific 'breakthroughs' we hear about never make it through the innovation process precisely because the execution is - usually at least - so much more important than the inspiration.
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Taking action on good ideas
I think I agree. Certainly implementation is what's lacking in Australia, and not simply the generation of new ideas. We seem unable to act on good ideas. Can we as a community even recognise good ideas when we see them? There are so many possible themes to analyse here -- the cultural cringe, the "not invented here" syndrome, the brain drain, to name just a few.
To cherry pick from my own recent comment on another Open Forum blog:
Why can't we make decisions in this country? Why do so many projects languish, neither championed nor canned, projects like national electronic health records, e-health in general, innovative alternative energy, smartcards, shared identity management infrastructure and so on? I don't think we suffer analysis paralysis, so much as a chronic difficulty telling good analysis from bad.The other major contributer to national indecision is fear. In business there has long been a view that we're more risk averse here than they are overseas. I recall Bob Ansett commenting years ago to the effect that if an American businessperson didn't go bankrupt once or twice in their career, then they weren't trying hard enough. In Australia we prefer to sit on the fence. So the cliche goes, a start up company cannot borrow money here until they're big enough that they don't need the loan anymore.
Stephen Wilson is Managing Director of the Lockstep Group.
Lockstep Consulting provides independent advice and analysis on identity
management, PKI and smartcards. Lockstep Technologies develops unique
new smart technologies to address transaction privacy and web fraud.
Pragmatism vs Innovation
I actually think we undersell ourselves when it comes to how innovative we are in this country, and that's part of the challenge. As proberts points out, when we think of innovation we generally think of new technology, rather than new systems or approaches.
Whereas in effect most successful companies are innovative insofar as they are constantly reviewing and updating their work practices and procedures. But we don't think of this as innovation, rather we term it pragmatism.
You know, the whole "tie it up with wire, just to keep the show on the road" caper - and it's got to be pretty deeply embeded in the culture if it's made its way into a John Williamson song.
I believe the challenge is more than we are not very good at communicating our procedural successes. Perhaps because processes are often modified in small ways, by different people, over a long period of time. Perhaps because process improvements are not valued within our business culture. Perhaps because culturally we're just not all that good at bragging about what we get right (unless of course it happens to happen on the sporting field).
I believe what would help here would be for industry associations to focus as much on communicating process improvements, as on focussing on the adoption of emerging technologies. I'm sure that when we start digging we'll be surprised by how much innovation is actually occuring, and not even the innovators are thinking of it in those terms.
Fiddling with soft innovation while Rome burns
In talking about "innovation", I should admit my bias towards scientific and technological innovation.
I will grant you of course that we can innovate in other fields of endeavour (like fashion, real estate, financial services, department store customer service, bank branch interior design, or fast food delivery). But douglasscomms, the reason we instinctively refer to work practice and procedure updates as "pragmatism" and not innovation is that they're just not in the same league.
I cannot agree that "process improvements are not valued within our business culture". I tend to think that process improvements (and incremental efficiency dividends) are all that banks and governments in particular are interested in.
What really changes the world, and what we desperately need more than ever in the next decade or two, is scientific and technological innovation. Medicine, IT, power generation, environmental engineering, biotech, auto engineering, Internet, telecommunications and so on are what a so-called “clever country” should concentrate on.