The Australian Innovation Community

It is very difficult for me to describe this development without using hyperbole; we created this website to encourage innovation in Australia and this new section represents a great deal of that. While elsewhere on the site we are still learning what infrastructure is needed and how to best encourage interaction, right here John Barker and his collaborators are doing it all.

We have posted Larry Quick’s paper “Creating 21st Century Capable Innovation Systems: Unleashing Creativity through Open Platform Innovation” on the AussieInnovation wiki.
The fundamental open-source idea and supporting discussion isn’t the only impressive part of this submission; the desire to innovate the whole innovation system and look at the assumptions behind it is also worth a look, and consideration.

In a recent speech at the Melbourne Institute 2008 Economic and Social Outlook Conference, called New Agenda for Prosperity, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Kim Carr said that, innovation was “the only way a country with first-world wages and living standards can stay in the game.”

Anyone interested in making a submission should definitely have a read through the complete text:

• “ New Agenda for Prosperity“

The speech by Prime Minster Kevin Rudd to the New Agenda for Prosperity Conference, Melbourne University, not only highlighted his Government’s commitment to innovation but outlined in broad strokes its plans for long term economic change. These were centred on the three “P”s: “productivity, workforce participation and population growth.”

You can read the complete speech here:

• “Towards a Productivity Revolution, A new Agenda of Micro-Economic Reform for Australia“

Do you have a brilliant idea that needs a little polish before it is ready to help change Australia? Let us in on the idea; the innovation community can help out with fleshing your idea out or just help you work out the implications. Maybe you will come up with the idea behind the submission that makes everything click.
Discussion forum

Google returns more than one million global results for "innovation definition" and more than 100,000 results from Australia. That’s about one definition for every 200 Australians! And that’s a symptom of our problem — we’re a great nation of individual inventors, but not so good at pulling together to get things done.
May I submit the 100,001st definition of innovation, which I believe summarises most of the others and provides a useful guide for action?
Innovation is the process of transforming an idea into something useful.

For those advanced users that are familiar with using bookmarklets, you can add this code to the bookmarks in your browser and make submitting links to the Australian Innovation News much easier:

javascript:q=(document.location.href);
void(open('http://aussieinnovation.com/news/submit?url='+escape(q),''));

Note: include all the above on a single line.