Published on the 02/08/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
Australia’s innovation steamroller is chugging on again following the election hiatus…
A day after being sworn in as Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Greg Hunt visited the national science museum Questacon in Canberra and stressed the importance of ongoing innovation efforts to Australia’s prosperity, claiming that; “Sixty percent of Australia’s productivity comes from innovation.”
He stressed that innovation efforts and the impact of the Government’s $1.1 billion National Innovation and Science Agenda should not be quarantined to start ups, but embraced by big business which was dependent on innovation for improved results.
The challenge for many enterprises is that innovation can be hard to manage and measure. It requires different investment strategies often focused on microfinancing, it demands time be set aside to focus on invention and innovation, and that an innovation culture be nurtured enterprise-wide.
To assess how successful enterprise innovation efforts are NAB Group Economics and NAB Labs, have teamed with The Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, to analyse both the measures and markers of modern innovation.
Melbourne Institute’s Guay Lim said traditional innovation measures, such as R&D and patents had been growing solidly since 1990 but have “flat-lined” since the end of the mining boom. NAB and the University in any case questioned whether these measures were true indicators of innovation across all industry sectors as they do not pick up the improvements, changes and adjustments to processes, products and services which still delivered innovation.
NAB Labs newly developed Innovation Index attempts to capture both radical and incremental innovation to give a truer picture of the nation’s overall performance.
It tracks the extent to which an organisation has “Tweaked, adjusted, improved or changed” anything over the last 12 months that allowed them to do things differently, faster, or more cost efficiently.
In this inaugural index Australian business scored 67.6 out of 100 with transport and storage ranking first followed by retail and manufacturing. The biggest barrier was identified as a lack of time to turn ideas into reality.
When companies were asked why they innovated, 76 per cent said it was to deliver more to customers, 70 per cent were driven by a need to boost productivity and reduce costs, while 51 per cent admitted it was a defensive move to fend off more innovative rivals.
