The Australian Innovation Community

By Philip SiefertFor companies to "go green," they need solutions that positively impact the environment without raising costs or sacrificing productivity.However, to make an impact, we all need to take personal action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  The longer we wait the more difficult it is going to be.  The point is to get started doing something now.  So I say, accept that this rebellion is real and realise that the time for taking action on global warming is not tomorrow, not even today, but this very minute.

The world's leading analysts predict that power hungry hardware and rising global fuel prices may lead to energy costs eating up more than a third of IT budgets within the next five years.

Global warming has emerged as the critical issue of the 21st Century. While governments worldwide debate the best formula to cut greenhouse gas emissions, change is inevitable.

Most world leaders concede that global warming is the fault of human kind and that intervention is a priority.

By Professor Stephen Leeder

The twelve years from now to 2020 will be constrained by demographic imperatives, economic realities, and demands of sustainability, Asian development and climate change. Within those constraints we will have choices - how wisely can we make them?

By Ben McDevitt

I felt honoured to be part of the 2020 Summit in Canberra. The opportunity to share ideas with such a diverse array of people from all walks of life on critical issues affecting our nation was fantastic. My only regret is that the time we had to actually put ideas onto the table was very limited and the opportunity to actually explore those ideas in a meaningful way was virtually non-existent.

By Narelle Kennedy

The Australia 2020 summit with its catch cry of ‘Thinking Big' certainly had the sense of being an historic occasion.

Led by the Prime Minster Kevin Rudd, it was a new collaboration, opening up the corridors of power to captains of industry, indigenous leaders, community activists, quiet achievers from rural communities, celebrities, youth, world class scholars, past and present political leaders and today's working journalists and politicians.

By Russell Yardley

Having just had my knee operated on last week I spent a good deal of my weekend looking in at the summit on ABC2. It was clearly a wonderful exchange of ideas amongst a well informed and diverse group of people.

The medical book (as in facebook) idea to share medical information with those who you choose was a clever twist on a proven idea that could solve the problem of the universal medical record that is consuming millions of dollars around the world.

By Dr Nicholas Gruen, Australia 2020 Summit Delegate

150 years after Adam Smith first expounded the miraculous way the market's ‘invisible hand' transforms private self interest into social prosperity, some economists argued that we could achieve the same result with sufficiently sophisticated government planning.

Enter the Austrian émigré Friedrich Hayek . . . who showed that markets achieve their efficiency by utilising information which is distributed throughout the economy and so often unavailable to government.

By Kerry Fallon Horgan When I asked John McFarlane, then CEO of ANZ Bank, whether to create an enabling environment that supports work/life balance it is necessary for an organisational leader to model this balance, his response was illuminating."Get a full life and then have success at work!"

By Prof Stuart B. Hill

Some thoughts on Kevin Rudd's '1,000 Great Minds' initiative (Australia 2020 Summit) and what might need to happen to improve its chances of success

Because of the holistic nature of the approach being advocated, all of these areas overlap and are highly interactive and interrelated.

1. Getting the usual ‘experts' together, to then plan for a better future. This always leads to tinkering with existing (flawed) plans, and excludes those most affected by such plans.