AussieInnovation.com Weblogs

The Wake of the Venturous — Inside the National Innovation System Review Green Paper

Timothy.Best — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 04:25:27 +0000

One of the catalysts for the creation of this Australian Innovation Community was the Review of the National Innovation System. We helped gather (and workshop) submissions as well as discussing the issues they raised. Several months on, the submissions have been read and the preliminary findings compiled.

One of our founding members, Jeremy Byrne, was on hand at this year’s InnoFuture conference to see Terry Cutler speak about the green paper the day after its launch, and Byrne has since delved into the story behind the story.

His analysis can be found below. Welcome to The Wake of the Venturous…

Part one: Context
Part two: Recommendations
Part three: Implications (available soon)

Carr’s “New Agenda for Prosperity” speech

Timothy.Best — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 14:01:55 +0000

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“

It offers insight into the Government’s approach to the system and where it sees a need for improvement, as well as some of the paths it’s exploring to move forward, especially in the context of the world stage. He said, “There are emerging giants of the so-called BRIC group – Brazil, Russia, India and China – for whom action tends to speak louder than words. “Forget about them moving into high-tech, high-value activities at some far-off time in the future. They are doing it now.” Brazil has legislated to provide incentives for research cooperation between universities, research institutes and private companies and that Russia is giving small businesses access to intellectual property created by the federation’s vast network of public research organisations. “This is the kind of policy activism we need to match if we are to build the future Australians want for themselves and their children,” he said. He outlined several initiatives including changes to the role of chief scientist, the establishment of new innovation and manufacturing centres, as well as ways to foster greater collaboration. He also made his commitment to listening to the community clear, calling the Review a “a watershed inquiry that will shape the innovation agenda for the next decade and beyond,” and then adding, “You have until the 30th of April to make a submission.” To discuss the topic in our forums click here.

Rudd’s “Towards a Productivity Revolution” speech

Timothy.Best — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 13:50:05 +0000

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“

It touches on plans for new work-place relations system in 2010, computers for every Year 9 to 12 students, tax reform targeted at giving people more incentive to work, and the need for immigration to keep Australia young. On innovation he said, “We are also reviewing Australia’s whole national innovation system, with the goal of making the changes necessary to foster greater investment in research and development and build a stronger culture of innovation in businesses.” He also highlighted the great importance of building a high-speed National Broadband Network, calling broadband “a fundamentally transforming technology of the future” and saying that “our ability to engage in the global digital economy of the twenty first century will be a key driver of our productivity growth.” He also declared that he was determined to lead “a reformist government” that will develop “innovative, long-term solutions to Australia’s long-term economic challenges.” To discuss the topic in our forums click here.

Discussion forum

Jeremy.Byrne — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:36:34 +0000

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

Adding a “Submit News” bookmarklet

Robert.Spencer — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:27:40 +0000

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.

If you have any suggestions for enhancing the bookmarklet, or have good instructions that we can post for how to use it, please leave them in the comments.

Social News enabled

Robert.Spencer — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:35:46 +0000

Another milestone on the road to the Launch of AussieInnovation.com has just been reached: our news feed is now enabled and, in the fine tradition of our community, this is not just a static list of stories. Instead, we have implemented a democratic, community-driven news system that ensures stories interesting to Australian Innovators rise to the top.

The first step is for you to get involved and submit any Australian Innovation-related stories that you find interesting, by clicking Submit Link (under /News in the menu in the left-hand sidebar). Any member of the site can suggest a link to a news item, announcement or even an interesting website, and you can view all the stories that have been submitted by fellow members of the Australian Innovation Community in the “/News/Breaking News” section of the site. (Advanced users might want to use our bookmarklet.)

The second step is to vote for those stories that you find interesting. (You can also vote negatively for stories you find boring or irrelevant.) Once a story has received enough votes, it appears on our News page and in our RSS feed. The order of stories is determined by the votes of our members in real time, so the top stories will always have significance to the community. Should the story not receive enough votes, or if enough users report a problem with the submission, the story will remain in the “Breaking News” area for 3 days before it will be removed.

Stories are short summaries of articles on other websites, with links to the article and provision for readers to comment on the article. All content and access to the news section of the site is free and open to everyone, but registration is compulsory for certain elements, such as voting for stories, submitting stories and commenting on stories.

Single Sign-On Implemented

Jeremy.Byrne — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:47:23 +0000

The AussieInnovation.com website is constructed from several different packages, each carefully selected as best of breed. Although this does involve some integration pain on our part, it will create a much more powerful piece of infrastructure for the community to use. We have recently integrated yet another package, the Central Authentication Server (CAS).

CAS allows us to store all of your login details in a single central database (actually, LDAP as discussed previously) and then only have to sign onto the website once. That’s the tricky part. Under normal circumstances each of the different web tools that we’re using requires you to log in using its own arcane system; our changes not only centralise this but also encrypt your username and password. (Hopefully you’re using a password for this website that’s different to the one you use for, say, your online banking, but it’s good practice to never transmit user/pass pairs in clear text—so we don’t.)

We are still rounding out a few sharp corners and making sure that all of the wiring is tucked away neatly, so if you notice something untoward, please report the bug on our contact page. However, everything works so there is no reason for you not to jump in and start contributing to our discussion on the National Innovation Review, suggest an idea that should be considered or add your previous or new submission to the wiki.

Falling Forward off the Leading Edge

Jeremy.Byrne — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:51:29 +0000

The digital infrastructure underlying AussieInnovation.com is designed both to be informed by and to define world best practice, and as such it uses Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for storing information about members of the site. Unfortunately, LDAP is an enterprise-level technology yet to reach the mainstream of commercial web hosting, with leading host management application CPanel expecting to introduce support for the protocol in the coming months.

Thus, AussieInnovation.com has moved webhosts from the US to Australia, and is now utilising the server space and bandwidth of WA-based sponsors, boutique ISP secure.com.au. You should see performance at least as good from the local providers, and even though we’re expecting to need to move to slightly larger premises one day, we’ll be sticking with secure’s advanced identity and authentication services into the foreseeable future.

Australian Innovation Community site in development

Jeremy.Byrne — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 06:23:24 +0000

In response to interest expressed at Stakeholder Consultation Sessions in Perth (06 March) and Melbourne (11 March), an Australian Innovation Community website incorporating forums, weblogging, news and information and social networking capabilities was seen to be a valuable community resource. Scheduled for soft launch in the week beginning 17 March 2008, the site saw its first content posted on 12 March.