David Robinson

• The impact of innovation on economic and productivity growth comes down to gaining competitive advantage. Businesses compete through offering better value for customers, either by improving the business offering or lowering the costs.

• Incremental innovation is critical to consistently improve the product offering and to satisfy demanding customers. Bishop Manufacturing does not ignore breakthrough innovation but concentrates on continuous improvement, learning by doing and letting the market be the test of value.

• Excellent knowledge of customers is critical. Anticipate customers' unarticulated needs. Must excel at this, even with the difficulties of global customers remote from Head Office operations.

• Bishop is a technology-based company but it sells its know-how and IP, not just product and equipment. Customers pay Bishop royalties for using its IP in their manufacturing processes. Bishop can compete on the basis of knowledge anywhere in the world, as long as it stays close to its customers, understands precisely how their business works and delivers solutions to their problems.



Mark Bradley

• The critical challenge is to turn IP into real value. This requires the engagement of industry to translate research and development into products for global markets. This in turn depends on the capacity of industry to absorb and make use of research and technology advances. Incremental improvements are important in Australia as most technology-based SMEs concentrate their R&D on design and product development.

• Australian industry, with its fragmentation, small size and low level of R&D investment has a relatively poor capacity to absorb technology generated by universities and research institutes. This can be ameliorated somewhat by forging linkages with international firms.

• We need to foster the linkages between our knowledge infrastructure, industry and government. Effective knowledge diffusion helps businesses turn new technologies into world-class products and services.

• Australia's focus to boost innovation and productivity should be on increasing both technology diffusion and the absorptive capacity of industry.


Andrew Stevens

• Need to view the backdrop of the history of major technological developments and the resulting patterns of economic and productivity growth. Each major technological innovation, from the steam engine through to ICT, has followed predictable 'life-cycle' stages, from eruption (invention), to disruption, to application and a 'golden era' when the economic benefits become pervasive.

• The challenge for business is to spot emerging trends and capitalise on them. This is made much easier by having excellent knowledge of customers, competitors and markets.

• The challenge now is to use information and communications technology to transform business models. This is not a call for firms to adopt more ICT, but to use it to enable specialisation in the business's distinctive competencies.

• The successful modern company competes using its know-how and IP, backed by a unique business model, e.g. Tetra Pak, Ebay and Bishop.



Professor Mark Dodgson

• Australians are good collaborators. We are very good at "CoPS" – Complex Product Systems – which include problem-solving, bundling products and services, and building consortia for projects.

• Australian firms must be ambidextrous, being able to innovate incrementally as well as handling disruptive innovations. This ability to do both is increasingly important for competitive advantage.

• Abolish the term "research and development" as it narrows our thinking about innovation. Replace "R&D" with the term "Think, Play, Do", as this language better reflects the realities of the innovation process as a source of competitive advantage. This is a more useful language to describe the reality of Australian innovation, which focuses more on design and product development rather than pure blue-sky research.

• Beyond ICT, there is an important new set of enabling technologies, namely, innovation infrastructure technologies like rapid prototyping, data mining, simulation, grid computing. Such technologies provide vital capabilities in implementing innovation processes in firms and Australia should invest in them.