Innovation Policy in Australia: Never a Better Time?

I attended the Grattan Institute event “Innovation Policy in Australia: Never a Better Time?” at the State Library tonight. Interesting discussion. Here were a few of the key insights:

• Australia is not a top tier innovation country. Tertiary education is our third highest export but we struggle to translate R&D into commercialisation. Better links between universities and business would help. 
• Trends towards renewables and recycling will undermine our key exports of coal and iron ore. And new frontiers takes decades of development and investment. Just look at the best case scenarios of the Asian Tigers - their advantages still took decades to develop.
• We can’t just piggyback off the rest of the world’s innovation: profit is higher for first movers over early adopters (e.g. Apple iPhone vs Samsung Galaxy); we need to innovate to even understand how others’ innovations work; and a lot of problems that require innovation are often peculiar to Australia (e.g. Hendra virus) so no one else will innovate for us.
• Australia gives very little funding to industry R&D compared to the OECD.
• Before WWII, universities weren’t even officially recognised as research institutions. After, official KPIs encouraged further research in universities. Only recently have they been encouraged to engage more with industry too.
• In light of expected trends in automation, there is scope (in addition to education and corporate incentives) to improve the social welfare state for individuals to account for increased structural unemployment and to reduce the fear of failure associated with risk taking, entrepreneurship and innovation?