Greenspan has returned Hawke to his rightful place as Australia’s greatest Prime Minister.

Here’s your bizzare personalised link. Just like Glenn Gould only smaller and hairier.

Cheers.

And I mean really AIs? That’s such such 20th century thinking. Big data in data out decision-making nodes? That’s a command economy mindset. Ubicomp and self-correcting fuzzy logic networks is where it’s at baby. The neu noosphere. You’ll notice the most amazing and successful use of computing power ever, the internet, is the utter opposite of stabilised and centralised data control.

Meanwhile back in the reality-based community.

Actually your point about a brain gain is taken. But the way to achieve that these days is not through presenting a more insular and conservative society but through offering great quality of life, excellent access to hard and soft infrastructure from tech to cash and an open minded culturally and socially laissez faire environment.

Eg: most of the US’s export income now comes from IP and the most of that is generated out of West and East Coast regions traditionally reviled as sinks of cultural and social iniquity by the kinda of social conversatives you seem to line up with. Or do you think it’s just a complete accident of fate that the most bohemian city in America, San Francisco, hatched Silicon Valley in its armpit. Or that the world’s entertainment industry is driven by the city of lost angels and flakes that found themselves.

Moving on, Crankynick and boredinhk raise excellent points about thinking of innovation beyond just whizzy science and tech stuff and about the need for venture capital.

Interesting to note here that Australia is now the world’s fourth largest managed funds market thanks to some pretty innovative thinking by our fin services pros (and compulsory super) yet our VC market is still so weedy.

True, reforming limited liability laws for VC partnerships over the past few years has seen the likes of Starfish, GBS Ventures and SciVentures seeding our biotech sector a bit more effectively. And it’s heartening to see the MTAA Super Fund getting in on the action. But we still don’t have anything like CalPERS (in quality if not quantity) taking a controlled but stimulating punt on the future of our ideas and skills instead of our bricks and mortar.

Maybe it’s a combination of historical and cultural factors (young, lacking in confidence, far away from home and nervous) and a small domestic market in which to trial stuff, but Australia’s never quite adopted the risk taking mentality of the Yanks at their best. US VCs kinda like it if you’ve failed once or twice – at least it shows you’ll go for it and have learnt from experience. While at the same time our attempts at successful dirigisme never went much beyond basic infrastructure (Hello Snowy Mountain River Project).

So I reckon a big part of lifting our innovation game is educating everyone along the commercialisation pipeline from fund managers to R&D bods to skills providers to bureaucrats to supporting service sectors (TDL, design, tech and prof services, etc) to get a lot more aware and funky/lateral about how it all knits together. And to take a bloody punt more often.

Here’s something else to chew on to keep this thread alive. The meaty bits kick around page 16. The dotty arrow motif is kinda pointless but kute.

…generate highly networked nodes of cultural and social production, circulation, transportation and transition…

Bollocks. Statements like this are just weasel words that can mean whatever anyone wants them to mean.
Cheers…

It’s all very well to be talking about the education system and preferred tendering and what-not, but the fundamental fact is that labs, computers, researchers and design and development cost money – and without venture capital funds that are prepared to tip a couple of million dollars into an early stage company and then help manage the development of the product and business, many of them won’t get much further than the laboratory bench or the CAD suite.

Australia doesn’t have a particularly well developed venture capital sector, by most accounts – there’s plenty of private equity cash sloshing about for later stage companies, but camparatively little money or expertise for early stage speculative investment.

The US, by comparison, has a large and mature venture capital sector (mostly by virtue of the size of the economy) – or, as an alternative model, Germany has had recent success in expanding the size of its life sciences industry, partly through the intervention of Government backed development banks (run on an aggressively commercial basism before anyone starts bleating about socialism and innefficiency).

I think it’s interesting that most of the Australian discussion has centred around regulatory change, limited levels of direct government grant assistance and R&D tax models – all of which are useful, but none of which provide the long term cash investment that innovative startups need to get through the early years.

We should also strip the negative gearing concession and capital gains tax concession for residential investment property. It just encourages unproductive speculation in real estate.

Yes Jack. What this country really needs right now is housing-supply-killing tax policy. Brilliant stuff, keep it up.

BBB

so if IBM, ‘frinstance, develop an iGivaToss wimax gadget, (which implements government of/by/for the iPeople according to the BigBrother model, and we get to toss a couple of iRep’s from The_iHouse each week,) which also functions as the iNationalIDCard, with fingerprint recognition, for iCitizenServicesAccountAudit…

they’ll do the research and testing in OZ, albeit with outsourced PRC engineers, where they get the australian taxpayer to pay for it via the tax break, and then score the AEC e-democracy tender with the iGivaToss platform?

Sweet.