CHASS President Professor Malcolm Gillies spoke at the National Press Club as part of the HASS on the Hill two day program. The following is an extract from his presentation.

Rethinking Australian Innovation

Australia is playing the innovation game with one hand tied behind its back. It is backing away from some of Australia's most able minds, when it should be pushing them forward. In a world rapidly transforming from technology-based economies, through knowledge economies to economies increasingly reliant upon highly mobile and talented people, Australia has all the ingredients to do well.

Most of the output measures are pointing upwards rather than downwards, but we are making only marginal progress up the OECD ladder of innovative success. We still sit in the middle of the pack, scoring better at having the bright ideas than with doing something about them.

So what needs to change - and what is changing - to make Australia a serious contender in the talend economy?

One essential change is that Australian innovation needs better to engage the arts as well as the sciences. To do that government policies will need to change, and the Australian industry will need to be convinced of the advantages in engaging that broader spectrum of Australian abilities.

I suggest that the equation of "science and innovation" is an old formulation that needs to be rethought. Let's do a creative reshuffle. Arts and innovation? Well, yes, the creative industries for instance. Things like films, music, interactive games and print media. They are worth about $20 billion each year in Australia, about 3.5 per cent of gross domestic product.

A second change is to build on our strengths, and to encourage the innovative side of undergraduate and graduate students.

Two-thirds of Australia's university students are now studying in some kind of humanities, arts or social science course. Their admission scores these days suggest that they are, on average, every bit as talented as the other third studying for science, technology, engineering and medicine. Even at the PhD level, half our graduates now come from non-science areas.

At the moment we do not encourage these most talented students, whether scientists or others, to take on a mindset of innovation. Out notion of the Phd, for instance, is antiquated, through overly rigid views of what constitutes a thesis and scant concern for the total graduate experience.

While we are sorting out the ways our disciplines and our bureaucracies relate, we could also tackle another matter: the R&D tax concession. This concession was set up to address the low investment in R&D by industry, and yet it specifically excludes research in the humanities, arts and social sciences, on the grounds that such research is ... not innovative! Clearly this concession needs to be rethought, if we are serious about encouraging industry to engage with this wider pool of Australian talents.

Edited extract from Malcolm Gillies talk at the National Press Club
Wednesday 17 August 2005