The formula for Australia’s sporting accomplishments holds the key to greater innovation. By Michael Barber.
It seems hardly necessary to stress the importance of innovation, particularly for productivity growth and, hence, future economic development. But whilst innovation is one of the current policy buzzwords at all levels of government and industry, we need to come to grips with what is required of us to realise our ambitions.
In the Australia in the Asian Century white paper, Australia set itself the target of being amongst the world’s top 10 nations in innovation by 2025 – we now lie 23rd in the OECD Global Innovation Index. Whilst universities can justly be considered amongst the incubators of innovation in terms of research and development, the prospects for improving our national standing cannot be met solely by high-level academic research. I believe that nothing less than a reforging of attitudes and approaches across the innovation sector and the broader community is required.
Uncomfortable though it may be, universities are amongst the organisations that must be prepared to let go of our past practices and change our thinking. Flexibility and adaptability – and, specifically, a willingness to find productive collaborations and partnerships with industry and business – are key to unlocking innovation. The possibility of aligning teaching and research agendas to those of external agents in the innovation system is one that needs to be embraced.
Flinders University is taking significant strides down this path. For example, a recent partnership between Flinders and Temple University, one of the leading business institutions in the United States, involved business students from Temple analysing the US market in terms of both partners and clients for Clevertar, a company developing applications for interactive avatar software based on Flinders research.
Preparedness to embrace creativity and marry innovation to specific market needs has led Flinders to the launch of the New Venture Institute. Its aspiration is to produce more entrepreneurs and innovators from our students, to make them, in the words of the president of Texas A&M University, “job makers not just job takers”.
The scope of the New Venture Institute will extend from hands-on “work integrated learning” experiences for students to the translation of successful research into products and services. This will include the potential attraction of capital to support commercial developments.
The institute will also tap into the skills and entrepreneurial experience of Flinders’ academic and research staff – particularly the Flinders Business School – and the university’s commercialisation arm, Flinders Partners.
This new focus also includes the university investing in a $120 million, 16,000-square-metre centre that brings computer science, engineering and maths to the former Mitsubishi site at Tonsley. The centre, which will incorporate a medical device partnership program, will aim to generate advanced manufacturing and skills that will drive employment and economic growth in Adelaide’s southern suburbs, the state and ultimately the nation.
That the site of this initiative is a former car assembly line speaks volumes. In America, roughly 7 million jobs for people with high school qualifications have been destroyed since the global financial crisis. And while manufacturing has returned to North America, it has come back characterised by high skills and robotics. Australia cannot hope to mimic the US, but if we have a future in any industry in Australia, it is around skilling up.
Whatever our current position as innovators, it is apparent that if we wish to improve our performance, particularly to top 10 status, we need to embrace the wider community more successfully and somehow get the key messages out. It is not enough for those of us in universities, innovative companies or key government portfolios to talk to and amongst ourselves. We need to start a conversation that everyday people understand.
To do so, I think we need some new thinking – a new narrative if you like – and certainly new examples that resonate for average Australians.
I invite those who can to cast their minds back to 1976, when Australia faced a crisis that, for most Australians, was more shattering and significant than events such as the dotcom crash, the end of the mining boom or the demise of manufacturing.
The crisis? We won no gold medals at the Montreal Olympics. Australia was shocked. So what did we do? We innovated and did so in a systematic way. The Australian Institute of Sport stems from those days – an initiative of the Fraser Government.
The AIS brought sport together with science and technology, talent identification and selection programs, nutrition, coaching and sports psychology, under an intensive focus on high-performance and a simple KPI: gold medals. The AIS was in itself an innovation, and one copied by many nations, arguably leading to the UK’s 2012 Olympic success.
However, the AIS is just the pinnacle of a much more systemic response to the crisis of 1976. Those of you with kids who play T-ball, Little Athletics and Kanga Cricket are all experiencing another innovation: adapt sports to children’s abilities so they develop their sporting skills at an appropriate rate to their development.
As a result, despite our comparatively small population, Australia achieved 4th position with 58 medals in the 2000 Olympics. Whilst more recently we have dropped back – 7th in London, with 35 medals – Australia’s position in Olympic rankings is one we can only dream of in the innovation rankings.
So what has this little bit of history to do with building an innovative Australia for the 21st century? Perhaps instead of bemoaning the fact that “Australia seems sports mad” or that Cathy Freeman or Cadel Evans are better known than Nobel Laureates such as Brian Schmidt or innovators like Peter Farrell (who took ResMed global on the back of Australian innovation) we should embrace and promote our sporting success as an example of innovation.
And perhaps the story of our Olympic journey from disaster to top 10 in less than 25 years also demonstrates that Australia’s aspiration to be top 10 in innovation by 2025 is not limited by our population or our geography, but simply requires dedication, skill, systemic commitment and improvement in a coordinated way across all dimensions of the system in order to happen.
Our future will not be delivered by higher education alone, but I believe it will not be delivered without higher education. And it will not be delivered at all if government, business and higher education don’t ask the question: how do we collectively educate our next generation and continue to educate the current job holders in Australia towards an economy with a new advanced manufacturing base?
I do not think we have a choice. We must repeat what we did in sport in innovation. As our AIS programs did for our sportspeople, we must support our graduates’ efforts to realise their individual aspirations and in doing so play a vital role in the transformation of Australia.
Professor Michael Barber is the vice-chancellor of Flinders University.
