Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

Professor Malcolm Gillies
President, Council of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
17 August 2005 - Canberra
National Press Club Address

[Extract from transcript]

In re-thinking Australian innovation, we need to recognise that we're dealing with a series of issues which are taking us from industrial models through knowledge models to talent models. For many of you who are here from the humanities, arts and social sciences, you probably haven't felt as though you have been included in the national debates about innovation.

Now before I go on, I did just want to say that I'm sorry to those viewers out there who thought that the M. Gillies who was giving this talk was a distant relative of mine, known for giving Gillies' Reports back in the 1980s.

Before you switch over to Days of Our Lives or whatever else is on some of the other channels, I'd just like to say this: that my message is that in a time of skill shortages, we must make sure that we use all the talents of all Australians to be as innovative as we can. That means everyone. We can't afford to have a mindset that says some talents are not needed in this innovative Australia. The industrial model of innovation has the notion of smart ideas leading to products, which then are taken to market through commercialisation or some process of technology transfer.

A friend of mine here in Canberra, a bureaucrat given to the habit of aphorism, expressed it very much like this. He said research turns money into ideas, and innovation turns ideas back into money. And he warned that in the equation of a Canberra bureaucracy and politicians, if you didn't have enough of the money coming back, you couldn't be expecting more and more money to be going into the research.

Now I would argue, and there's a big literature that would argue, that we've been moving to expand those notions of innovation with the concept of Knowledge Economies - economies that take smart ideas, and as well as turning them into smart products, also turns them into smart ways of doing things. The result is new processes, new operational processes, and new management processes.

But then we get to this issue. Is it the ideas and technology that transfer, or is it people who are the best agents for that transfer? What we've been seeing, with notions of creative class and creative economies, is that it is the transfer of people that gives the most efficient transfer of ideas and helps them to move down that train, eventually to generate value. There are exceptions, a couple of areas, where the transfer of ideas works, pharmaceuticals perhaps being one.

The Talent Economy - a new idea - is one that focuses on those people. It's designed to see how we can make people be as inventive as possible in contributing to their economy. And through that, to sustain and to grow innovation.

We could say that talent is the new gold. And when I think of talent, I think of talented sports people who go on to do great things in the Olympics. I think of talented people in science, who even at the ages of sixteen or seventeen are winning at the Physics Olympiads, the Chemistry Olympiads, or the Mathematics Olympiads.

But then I also think of other people, practising away, who hope to win a place in the Sydney International Piano Competition, or in the Australian Youth Orchestra, our elite Orchestra for young musicians.

And I think of the people taking part in debating competitions and how after participating in these national or international competitions they go on to become our leading lawyers and politicians. We need to be considering all of those talents and recognising a tremendously fundamental thing: that the ones who may be doing best in the Physics Olympiad are also playing in the viola section of the Youth Orchestra; and the ones winning in the debating competitions are the ones who are also doing extremely well in sport.

Why is it that now, at a time when we're talking about skills shortages, Amanda Vanstone is talking about the fact we need 20,000 skilled people, particularly engineers and doctors, and how her Department is looking at the way in which we can find them quickly?

Why at a time when we find the Chief Scientist of Queensland, Peter Andrews, stating that we need 80,000 more scientists than we're likely to produce, by the year 2010?

And why is it when we have such skilled shortages, that we have such skills wastage?

And by that I'm referring to many of the talents of the people here in this room.

I'm talking about that half of researchers in Australian universities who are in the areas of humanities, arts and social sciences, maybe studying English, maybe involved in investigations into psychology, perhaps involved in archeology and anthropology.

How is it that we don't take advantage of the skills of these people?

Is it perhaps that the people in humanities, arts and social sciences are not good enough?

 

Professor Malcolm Gillies
17 August 2005 - Canberra

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For more information, please contact:

Toss Gascoigne

Executive Director

Council of the Humanties, Arts and Social Sciences

Phone: +61 2 6249 1995

director@chass.org.au