One of the key research priorities the Australian Business Foundation has set itself is on the topic of Leadership & Learning.

We plan to undertake research to strengthen our understanding about the specific connections between business and education that drive competitiveness and productivity.

Australian enterprises are competing in a new economy these days.

The new economy is characterised by continual innovation and the ever decreasing shelf life of business ideas and product cycles.

Electronic and online technologies are transforming not only how we do business, but who our customers are and how we give them value for money.

Knowledge - know-how and skills - increasingly form the competitive edge of successful firms. Money is made by turning fresh ideas into new capabilities and sustaining these within an enterprise, until the time comes for the next adaptation, technological advance or innovation.

Lifelong employability – the capacity to be productive and to hold rewarding jobs over one's working life – is no longer guaranteed by our early education and training.

How can people stay employable when new technologies are transforming the very nature of business and work?

What can businesses do to prepare themselves to meet the need for skills as yet unanticipated, in jobs yet to be invented?

These questions were the subject of debate at a recent Roundtable hosted by the Australian Business Foundation on New Skills for the New Economy.

Among the intriguing ideas emerging were the following:

• The boundaries between education and work are blurring, or as the forthright educationalist and adviser Dale Spender put it, learning can't be distinguished from earning.

The information age requires workers to be active learners, who update their knowledge and skills, and who apply their knowledge in bite-sized chunks to solve problems. They cannot rely on a stable set of single packaged competencies developed at uni, TAFE, or as an eighteen year old apprentice.

• Technological advances are setting the pace of change in the business world. So, learning to learn is the only protection against a permanent national skills gap.
  

Our concept of education must change radically in a short space of time, if we are to prosper in the future, given the shortages in our information and communication technology skills.

• Peter Kearns, the OECD education researcher, commented that Australia's education system is not organised to meet new learning needs. The knowledge being taught is for today's business, not how to adapt to tomorrow's changes.

Creativity and enterprise skills needs to be mixed with business acumen.

Opportunities for lifelong learning must become the norm.

Learning cannot be confined to the classroom. It also needs to occur in the workplace and in the community, where the goal should be to cultivate the partnerships between education providers, enterprises and individuals to foster local "learning communities".

(Kearns vision was one where learning moved from universities to businesses to the village green and town square and shopping mall.)

The call was also made for a changed mindset to more individualistic, self-directed learning.

People, especially young people, were urged to think less in terms of a job, and more in terms of marketing their skills to a buyer.

The emphasis should not be on employment, or a job and the necessary credentials for it. Rather, the emphasis should be on employability – acquiring and managing the skills you want to develop and demonstrating how they can add value to a prospective employer.

These concepts imply revolutionary changes in our education system, in industrial relations and in the day to day challenges facing business managers.

The Australian Business Foundation's research hopes to deepen our understanding of these challenges and come up with some imaginative and practical responses.