Australian businesses need to get their innovation mojo back on track after flatlining following the COVID-19 pandemic, when breakthroughs were hampered by stubborn inflation and global disruption.
But hiccups could lie ahead given the current state of the world, dominated by the US war on Iran and the war in Ukraine, feeding a general malaise in the enterprise sector.
The Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research has just finished crunching a massive set of hard data for an 18-year peek at the nation’s innovation pathway.
It tracked innovation activity from 2006/27 to 2023/24, drawing on de-identified information provided by businesses to governments and other agencies to create a performance index.
The CommBank/MI national innovation index reflects a respectable average growth of 1.94 per cent a year in the 18 years since 2026/07 in “new to the world” innovations and “new to the firm” changes.
However, actual growth has been stagnant since 2021/22, despite edging up to an index peak of 110 points in 2023/24, the leading research centre attached to the University of Melbourne found.
“Businesses lost confidence,” study co-author Beth Webster told AAP.
“It changed a lot of behaviours and hasn’t been totally reset.”
At its core, innovation is the process of creating value by applying novel solutions to problems to drive business growth.
Some real-world Australian examples include ticketless public transport and the invention of the Gardasil vaccine, which protects against cervical cancer, by Melbourne-based CSL.
Professor Webster said the local biotechnology sector had benefited from investment by governments, universities and research institutes since the 1980s.
“It’s certainly had a fair run and it’s still gathering strength,” she said.
But Australia also seems to be very good at wholesale trade innovation, which came in as the biggest winner of the past 18 years, followed by manufacturing, then professional, scientific and technical services.
The wholesale trade sector is involved in designing, servicing and selling goods and includes businesses that have trademarks or patents and highly skilled workers.
Some of its success stems from shifting processing offshore.
“They might be designing heaters or split systems and they’ve just outsourced the processing part,” Prof Webster said.
At the same time, not enough Australian companies are integrating well enough into the international innovation system, including financing.
“Innovation is a team sport … you have to have people who are integrated into what else is going on,” Prof Webster said.
“We’re doing well in mining technology, in agricultural technology, but I think we’ve fallen behind in other areas.”
Looking beyond 2023/24 is difficult given the current geopolitical uncertainty.
“People aren’t necessarily withdrawing money, but they’re stopping reinvesting it – they are saying ‘I might wait a little longer and see what happens’,” Prof Webster said.
While the next index report is a way off, it’s likely to signal the extent of artificial intelligence-related innovation, including machine learning and language models.
“There’s too much uncertainty, I think, about the value,” Prof Webster said.
The best piece of advice to would-be innovators is “relationships matter”.
“Embed yourself in the ecosystem, and bring in the finance sector early; talk to your financial manager,” Prof Webster said.
“It’s only when they’ve got confidence in you that they will lend to you, and financing is going to be one of your biggest hurdles.”
* The index was developed in partnership with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
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