Political Will and Priorities: Destination

• Vision and leadership of the debate at the political and governmental level. Determination to make innovation a hallmark of Australian way of life; presupposes recognition of our flaws and failings and not defensiveness or complacency borne out of need for political pointscoring and electoral spin.
• Deliberate efforts to forge common and shared vision across all stakeholders.
• Bring the community along. Innovation is not a game where the winners are only the worldclass scientists with accolades from their peers or the business enterprises which capitalise and profit from them. Innovation should be a rising tide that lifts al boats when it comes to prosperity, standards of living and the aspirations of ordinary citizens.
• This allows for bipartisan support and political buy-in and pay-off across the spectrum.
• Words must be backed up by deeds, eg tax reforms to boost innovation and commercialisation, investment in education, necessary machinery of government changes – all aimed at propelling Australia into capturing benefits of the new markets, opportunities and value chains of the knowledge economy. Not restricted to high tech, IT and communications, but harnessing innovation in all areas of economic endeavour, even most mature, declining and traditional industries.
• The vision, sense of urgency and deft partnerships between public and private sector leaders to make it happen – that is what the Industrial Innovation WG calls for.
• Talk up innovation widely to put it on the agenda for all Australians, something that defines us, that we're proud of. Australian governments should stop apologising for themselves and their perceived limitations and start governing aggressively in the public interest, facilitating and catalysing action from all quarters for a common goal.

National Innovation Strategy & Targets – The Road Map

• Concept of a national innovation system presupposes harmony, the parts working in unison. Not only all parts and policies of all levels of government meshing together, but between government, business, academia, science, community and other stakeholders. This is a prerequisite to a national innovation strategy, with one, five and ten year targets. This is not the centrally imposed grand plan, but a direction setter that tolerates and accommodates diverse paths and disparate goals.
• National Innovation Strategy should be a roadmap to the destination set by our vision of Innovative Australia -–how can be fulfil the promise of becoming the 21st century "brand" – youthful, energetic, clever, adaptable, inventive, and reflecting our cultural values of openness, ingenuity and giving everyone a "fair go".
• The process of developing the Strategy, so it gets "buy-in" and it makes sense to all players, is as important as its content.

Some of the crucial features of a National Innovation Strategy are:

• culturally appropriate, learning from but not just mirroring what works elsewhere;
• wide coverage of innovation activity – by schools, business, government, local communities to build an entrepreneurial culture Aussi-style;
• specific industry capability building strategies, based on in-depth sector specific intelligence and overcoming our fear of picking winners by concentrating on those sectors/activities that will deliver most for Australia in terms of wealth, jobs, global markets and productivity.

Implementation is the crunch. Strategy must be rolled out in feasible, bite-sized chunks and that'is why we suggest 1, 5 and 10 year targets.

Industry Clusters, Skills, Global Brands, New Enterprises: The Vehicle

Rubber hits the road. Industrial Innovation, WG doesn't have all the answers – see other WG efforts and in fact, the learning we should all do at the Summit. But, some of the more potent vehicles to create Innovative Australia we see as follows:

• Industry Clusters All the action seems to happen at the borderlines/the frontiers (says Howard Gwynne) – breakthroughs from cross-disciplinary insights, melding of functions in firms, and convergence and recombinations of old and new technologies. Same applies from the knowledge generation, competitive edge, risk sharing and new opportunities that are created by strategic collaboration, clustering between firms, and linkages across industries – especially for global reach.
• Global Brands In our Vision of Australia in 2010, many Australian firms make networking and alliances the norm – becoming global nodes of excellence in huge global corporate networks, value chains or multinational organisations.
• This is only part of the process of creating global brands from Australia. Australia harnesses its location-specific assets and becomes a good home for value creation.
• Peak bodies, industry and professional associations should lift their game dramatically. They an provide the information and leadership on what is needed to achieve global integration and get their hands dirty by initiating R&D consortia, forging linkages between firms, supply chains and industries, fostering technology incubators and encouraging Australia to build centres of excellence in the high growth sectors essential to tomorrow's prosperity – natural magnet globally.
• Skills Key messages from our work is the need to invest more in education and skills for the new economy – in everything from teacher training on entrepreneurship to better commercialisation and management skills through sabbaticals, industry/uni exchanges and other crossovers between people in politics, business, science, technologists etc, to incubators to mentoring by successful serial entrepreneurs to more flexible work visas to enter Australia for skilled people.
• Our WG came up with the concept of mining the talent of the Australian diaspora – a virtual alumni of ex-patriate Australians whose skills should be used for Australian enterprises and whose networks and profile should be harnessed to brand Australia internationally.
• New Enterprises. Our aim should be managing abundance not scarcity, fostering an environment which encourages, generates and supports new business ventures and entrepreneurial effort. Let a thousand flowers bloom. This means the suite of policies on tax, education, immigration, S&T, strategic industry policy, venture capital, economic and labour market reform and the like must be working in concert.
• This has only skated across the surface, but we believe these factors are likely to be crucial in any changing of the trendline from "Business as Usual" to "Innovative Australia" – clusters, skills, global brands, new enterprises.

National Institute of Innovation: The Driver

• How to drive all this? We recommend one key new institution – a National Institute for Innovation, similar to the role performed by the Australian Institute of Sport in fostering worldclass sports performance.
• The National Institute of Innovation would champion much of the action we recommend elsewhere and take the lead to make sure it happens.

For example, an important function would be in accessing and diffusing leading edge technologies widely within the Australian business community, including with SME's. The goal is to undertake those market shaping and market enhancing activities that propel Australia into the areas of economic endeavour that are the real generators of tomorrow's prosperity and business success.

• Central to this would be a key role for the National Institute of Innovation in intelligence gathering about new technologies, market trends, global branding, emerging industries and new forms of competition based on online and networking technologies and the like.
• This work would goad/drive/aid firms to choose the path of technological upgrading, continuous innovation, incremental input, and new business development and reinvention rather than to take the easy option of downsizing and cost cutting or competing in declining industries using old methods with fewer and fewer productivity returns.

Australian Innovation Indices: The Travel Diary and Log Book

• Finally, based on the premise that you are what you count, we need urgently to know more about the actual way innovation works and precisely how innovative Australia is.
• There's room for a set of Australian Innovation Indices (scoped and worked up by our best and brightest, drawing on international benchmarks) which measures the full range of Australia's innovation performance and capability as part of our official national statistics.

AND IF WE DO GET IT RIGHT, IMAGINE THIS PICTURE OF AUSTRALIA IN THE YEAR 2010.