{"id":39680,"date":"2023-10-20T15:03:49","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:03:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/innovation-as-a-safe-word-what-went-wrong-with-the-governments-knowledge-nation-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:03:49","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:03:49","slug":"innovation-as-a-safe-word-what-went-wrong-with-the-governments-knowledge-nation-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/innovation-as-a-safe-word-what-went-wrong-with-the-governments-knowledge-nation-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"Innovation as a safe word: What went wrong with the government’s Knowledge Nation – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article originally appeared on Decoding The New Economy.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

After two complacent decades Australia\u2019s pivot away from a mining and housing-based economy is promising to painful. In anticipation of the punishment to come, the nation\u2019s political and business leaders have devised a safe word they hope will ease the pain: Innovation.<\/p>\n

That safe word was desperately repeated as a group of \u201cinnovation rock stars\u201d gathered last week at Sydney\u2019s Knowledge Nation summit, billed as bringing together the nation\u2019s leaders to drive the implementation of the Australian government\u2019s National Innovation and Science Agenda.<\/p>\n

Knowledge Nation showed that despite having a safe word, Australia\u2019s Anglo-Saxon, male dominated elites aren\u2019t prepared for an economic pivot, and true change in the nation will have to be a grass roots movement led by small business and community groups.<\/p>\n

A lack of diversity<\/h3>\n

Notable in the selection of \u201ckey leaders from the innovation, science and technology ecosystem, including entrepreneurs, business leaders, investors, researchers and scientists, and policymakers\u201d was the lack of diversity.<\/p>\n

A look of the speaker list showed only four of the 15\u00a0speakers being women and only one of the 15 not being from an Anglo-Saxon background.<\/p>\n

One of the baffling things about modern Australian is the how few from non-Anglo groups feature among the ranks of the business, politics or media leaders. Yet Australia\u2019s greatest success has been in integrating the successive immigration waves over the late 20th century.<\/p>\n

A visitor to Australia could be forgiven for not noticing the country\u2019s diverse population as the media, politics and business is dominated by those of British heritage. For the country, this is a tragic wasted opportunity and was reflected in the line up of “innovation rock stars”.<\/p>\n

Disjointed government<\/h3>\n

The political \u2018leadership\u2019 also reflected that lack of diversity when\u00a0three federal government ministers \u2014 all men and no opposition, state or local figures \u2014 lined up to recite the grab bag of thought bubbles that are what now passes as policy in Australian government.<\/p>\n

Ministers offered succession of turgid recitals of disjointed programs which do little to address Australia\u2019s structural barriers towards innovative businesses or the wholesale de-funding of education institutions, although the innovation minister\u2019s snarling response to an academic\u2019s question about R&D spending told much about their defensive posture.<\/p>\n

The political \u2018leaders\u2019 illustrated a key problem in the nation\u2019s pivot. The long-term failure of consistent planning across portfolios means no Australian investor, entrepreneur or student can have any confidence in government policies over a five or 10\u00a0year horizon when policies barely survive one ministerial thought bubble.<\/p>\n

Overall though the biggest gap in the Knowledge Nation summit was its focus on government \u2014 the real weakness however lies in the corporate sector where inward facing service industries are distributing more on dividends than in research and development.<\/p>\n

Inward focus<\/h3>\n

That inward focus, articulated well by Freelancer CEO Matt Barrie who described how almost all of the nation\u2019s 20\u00a0biggest corporations are domestically-focused service businesses, is the real problem facing Australia as it tries to pivot its economy away from being dependent on the fading Chinese commodities boom and domestic property speculation.<\/p>\n

A lack of globally competitive businesses leaves the nation exposed as most employment is in organisations that are unable to survive outside a relatively protected domestic market. It also means these companies don\u2019t see the need to invest in research and development as their fat profits are dependent upon market dominance rather than innovative products and services.<\/p>\n

Barrie also had the only challenging idea in a day that promised many of them, the somewhat tired trope of abolishing Australian state governments.<\/p>\n

Government focus<\/h3>\n

It\u2019s quite touching that Barrie sees Australian federal governments as being havens of intelligent, long-term policy making when all the data indicates otherwise.<\/p>\n

The very idea of Canberra running education given its flip flopping on the Gonski reforms, confused policies on university funding and ideological obsession with funding elite private schools is, quite frankly, derisory.<\/p>\n

That the most challenging idea out of the day was the old chestnut of flattening Australian government speaks volumes of the dearth of original thinking coming out of the nation\u2019s business and political leadership.<\/p>\n

In truth, Australian business needs to be snapped out of its inward rent seeking focus while the household sector needs to be weaned off speculating on residential property. These require real policy reform and cultural change.<\/p>\n

Little leadership<\/h3>\n

Knowledge Nation showed there is no understanding, let alone appetite, for that reform or change from Australia\u2019s elites and as the Australian economy starts to feel the pain from 20\u00a0years of complacency we can expect the safe word of \u2018innovation\u2019 to be increasingly used by the nation\u2019s elites.<\/p>\n

The lesson from Knowledge Nation is Australia\u2019s economic pivot will come from the grassroots. It will be startups, small businesses, community groups and local governments that will lead the change. Australians waiting for government support and corporate leadership will be waiting a long time.<\/p>\n

In meantime, squealing \u2018innovation\u2019 at every sign of economic pain will be occupying much of the time of Australia\u2019s comfortable Anglo elites.<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on Decoding The New Economy.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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This article originally appeared on Decoding The New Economy. After two complacent decades Australia\u2019s pivot away from a mining and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61331,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39680"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}