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On 2 May 2006, Australian Business Foundation invited Professor Mark Dodgson, Director of the Technology and Innovation Management Centre at the University of Queensland Business School, to speak on the topic of Innovation carriers. Co-hosted by ABF corporate member Telstra, the concept of 'innovation carriers' was explored, providing a new angle on the growth of services in advanced economies and the role they can potentially play in driving innovation.

Professor Dodgson pointed out that enterprises are compelled to innovate in a highly complex and fundamentally uncertain environment. Contemporary processes of innovation involve many more players and more blurry boundaries between manufacturing and services than previously. Accordingly, the shift from individual and corporate innovation to 'open' or 'distributed' innovation has stimulated demand for knowledge-intensive service firms of all sizes and fields. These include legal and accountancy, engineering and design, advertising, market research and management consultancy. Knowledge-intensive services help enterprises manage the (literally) unpredictable costs and obstacles to business transformation.

A central theme of Professor Dodgson's presentation was that innovative carriers are essentially agents who connect problem identifiers with problem solvers. Examples of such carriers are:

• Partners of the enterprise, especially demanding customers and innovative suppliers.
• Consultancies and service providers.
• Technologies (whether new or rearranged) that enable the virtual creation of products and their testing with customers.

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