I wear leather shoes on a regular basis, it’s a technology probably invented during the last Ice Age to wrap animal skins around one’s feet, and has only changed in a few details since then. It’s an old design, but it works for me. Should I maybe feel innovative and wear circuit boards on my feet? Or go for something sustainable and wear banana skins? Hmmm, some really innovative (but useless) ideas coming here.

We don’t want to be innovative, we want to be usefully innovative. The two things are completely different. You have to identify real problems that are actually worth doing something about, rather than inventing an interesting solution and going round looking for an application.

Here’s a real-world idea that does address a real problem. Consider taking a small front-wheel drive car, pop off the back wheels, replace those with similar size wheels containing high efficiency rare-earth hub motors, and whack some supercapacitors, a handful of drive MOSFETs and a power management system in the boot. Instant hybrid car. No need for heavy, inefficient expensive batteries. Perfect for stop/start traffic, the electrical system does a bit of regenerative braking, gives extra kick-off from the lights and adds a touch of traction control on corners to beat the annoying front-wheel-drive understeer. Retrofits to existing vehicles, light weight, easy to build. There’s a fortune right there waiting to be made.

But the development costs.

You need to design the hub motors from scratch because they don’t exist. Supercapacitors are not easily available either, and the drive and management systems are hugely complex. Get that far and you have generation one, but you can’t drive that on the road yet. Probably a year on the test track tuning it (what? you don’t have a test track?) then you can START going through all the legal red tape of making it street legal. So there’s one cheap idea — amazing innovation! Unfortunately, not a cheap product, all those little practical details. It may turn out that the efficiency gain doesn’t pay back against the cost of the parts and the additional weight, you won’t know that until after a whole lot of real world testing, after which you might be throwing it away.

That’s pretty much what always happens, big ideas are a dime a dozen, making them work needs teams of experts, years of fine tuning and lots of boring grunt work that no one is in the least bit excited about. And that’s for the good ideas, the bad ideas also involve a lot of development work until you work out that they are bad ideas. Australia needs to get good at taking on that product development and testing grunt work, everything else will get sorted out by itself.

I agree with the issue of education. But warning! If Australia spends too much money creating highly educated people, most of them will just leave and get jobs in Europe. Since the real dopes at the bottom of the ladder soak up as much money as you throw them, and the bright sparks will go their own way regardless… the paydirt is going to be found in bringing up the median education level. That means a modest improvement over a large number of people. So go for policies that help a bit here and there, but lots of those. Don’t go for big “gee whiz” projects — the sort of projects that attention-seeking career-path politicians favour.

The best thing about educated people is not that they have wonderful new ideas, but that they keep up to date with what other educated are doing so we are guaranteed to at least stay level with the crowd.

A couple of things of relevance:
I spoke about the need for more focus on technical skills (every child should learn basic programming) to help all our citizens to better leverage technology in all circumstances.

Stephen Fry, in the guise of reviewing the Sandisk Sansa, observed that houses of the future used to be thought of in terms of masses of gadgets requiring in-depth electronic knowledge to maintain, whereas houses of the present have masses of gadgets that just work.

One of David Brin’s pet peeves has been the lack of access to a simple hands-on programming experience like the original BASIC: where people could type something in, and see what it really does. (hint: what do you have to do to print ‘hello world’ in a windows environment)

Australians are innovative, but Australia isn’t.

I work for a company whose focus is on innovation. It’s former director was heard to comment that Australia is ‘the land of retail, banks, and mining’ and liked to show a picture of the Earth at night, remarking ‘the light is where the action is. We’re in this dark bit here.’

We *need* to be innovative to survive out there in the dark!