The Australian Innovation Community

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.

Let me explain: Innovation is not the same as invention. To invent something is to describe an idea, not to actually make it. Patents, copyright and other intellectual property rights are acknowledgments of the novelty of the idea about a new product, process, literary work etc; they are not demonstrations of the actual existence of something that works. Things exist when the idea has been innovated.

Something useful doesn’t necessarily mean that the thing is just a handy widget. It means that you have made a system — a collection of materials and/or processes — that can be used for a purpose. The system might be mainly materials, or mainly processes or a combination of both — but if it works — it fulfills an intended purpose.

Innovation is a transforming process. It’s not a single, isolated, inspirational event. It’s the 99% perspiration that Edison famously spoke about. It’s bringing enough good people together with enough materials and enough knowledge and systematically motivating them enough to achieve an objective: to try to make an idea work. And, just because it seemed like a good idea, and they tried their best, it may not work, or work well enough to be useful. That’s the risk. That’s innovation and that’s managing innovation.

So what are we trying to do? We have inventive individual Australians. We now have lots of people who simultaneously have the idea of an Innovative Australia — a nation that pulls together and gets things done. Now we need to transform that idea into something that works. That’s the process of Innovating Australia. It means bringing enough good people together with enough materials and enough knowledge and systematically motivating them to make an Innovative Australia.

That process starts with sharing our ideas as to what an Innovative Australia might look like — that’s developing a collective invention, a shared understanding or vision. We are getting better at doing that step, from focus groups of a dozen with Hugh McKay, to Australia 2020 Summits of a thousand with Kevin Rudd. Then we need to work on getting a shared understanding of the transformation process: how do you get an idea off the page, drawing board or screen and into some manifest form? How do you manage and motivate innovators? How and where do you get the materials and money? How do you manage the risks? How much is “enough”? And so on.

It surprises many people that innovation can be managed. But it’s not surprising that they are surprised, because there are practically no courses on "management of innovation" in Australian educational institutions. Certainly, there are bits and pieces — insightful seminars and the occasional short course, but not with a scale and scope that will ever produce enough innovative Australians, let alone achieve our vision of an Innovative Australia. What’s more, the media treats innovations as events, not processes, as well as confuse invention with innovation.

To date, we haven’t done enough together, or done it systematically enough to reasonably expect to make that transformation. The accent is on enough — that is, making investments on a scale commensurate with the task that we wish to achieve.

So, let’s try to make a National Innovation System that is worthy of the name. Let’s try to transform a nation of inventors into an innovative nation, not just a nation of innovators. That’s the "system" part of the title — people working together for a purpose.

We can do it. Together.