I have watched the pro and anti-globalisation forces line up at the recent World Economic Forum meeting in Melbourne with the same morbid fascination that simultaneously draws and repels you to car crashes and horror films.

On one hand, I'm pleased that the world's most developed nations and political and business elites are being forced to confront their self-satisfied rhetoric and the previously unquestioned benefits of unfettered global trade and orthodox free market economics.

On the other, I am appalled by the mindless intolerance of some anti-globalisation interests, whose goals are to howl down debate and divergent opinion, without any intention of seeking fresh insights and imaginative solutions to intractable problems.

Globalisation has become a slogan whose meaning is being eroded by overuse. Commentators have noted the irony that anti-globalisation protests largely owe their success to the effective use of the tools of globalisation, particularly sharing intelligence and organising people worldwide through the internet.

These current events come straight from the pages of one of the Australian Business Foundation's most ambitious research projects, an Alternative Futures: Scenarios for Business in Australia to the Year 2015.

With the help of leading international futurists, GBN Australia, we mapped out four plausible alternative futures potentially confronting Australian enterprises over the next 15 years or so, given trends like globalisation, advances in online and other technologies, the rise of the knowledge economy, new patterns of consumerism and concerns with the social and environmental impacts of business.

One of the futures we imagined seems to be playing itself out in events like the World Economic Forum and its ensuing controversy and public protests. This picture of the future we called "Sound the Retreat".

"Sound the Retreat" is the story of the backlash and consequent decay of globalisation, forcing Australia to revalue its bilateral business relationships as multilateral ones become impossible, in the face of trade barriers, capital and immigration controls and nationalist and protectionist policies of all sorts.

There is an economic downturn, a widespread capital retreat and loss of investor confidence, creating a lonely and isolationist future for businesses. Retreating from global connections to avoid their downside will only result in lower standards of living for the Australian community as a whole.

But, while the answer can't be to hide from globalisation, neither is globalisation inevitable, where we are caught in its slipstream without control.

Globalisation manifests itself in the speed and ease of the flow of ideas, technologies, capital, research and production facilities, labour and skills around the world. Fuelled by advances in information, communications and online technologies, globalisation makes us both more mobile and more interconnected.

The task for Australia is to realise that while globalisation can challenge national sovereignty and open us up to new lower cost competitors, it also allows us to create our own truly international brands and companies and to position ourselves in the value chains of large global enterprises.

The question is how. Our track record to date is fairly slim – some mining and resource companies; News Ltd; Fosters; one or two banks and financial institutions are having a go; and high tech firms like ResMed and Cochlear have gone global early and so far still retain their Australian origins.

Meeting this challenge clearly will involve:

• capitalising on business innovations;
• fostering the competitive skills of our people; and
• capturing value not only from exporting products and services, but also from leveraging our capabilities and our ownership of global assets and intellectual property.

Australia met the challenge of globalisation in the outstanding success of both the staging and sporting performance of the Sydney 2000 Olympics. Let's turn out minds to how we can reproduce this in the business world.