How is Australia faring in the global innovation race?

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How is Australia faring in the global innovation race?

A ‘sneak peak’ article from Sydney Business Connect print magazine

A ‘sneak peak’ article written by Gaia Grant for Sydney Business Connect print magazine

We expect to see Australia sprinting to the forefront of the ‘innovation race’ in the wake of the launch of the ‘innovation agenda’ and ‘the ideas boom’. Yet if you look at some of the global innovation measures that were released last year, Australia hasn’t ranked too highly.

In the 2015 Bloomberg Innovation Index, which focuses on the number of patents registered, Australia comes out at number 13, and in the 2015 Global Innovation Index (which considers a few more factors), Australia is number 17.

Are these the best ways of measuring innovation potential? If we were to measure innovation in companies (not just countries) by patents alone, IBM and Samsung would come out on top, and Facebook wouldn’t even make it to the top 40!

Innovative companies are not simply coming out with a lot of ideas. They may be coming up with fewer ideas, but they are often better ideas. Australia, similarly, appears to have a huge amount of potential if different measures are used. Australia comes out in the number one innovation position out of 139 countries in the 2015 Global Creativity Index. This index was developed by urban studies theorist Richard Florida from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto as an alternative to innovation measures that focus on patents.

Read more on the following PDF document How is Australia faring in the global innovation race?