Transcript: 2013 Australia Germany Innovation Forum - Keynote address

Transcript

24 January 2013

>>Göran Roos: It is, of course, a pleasure to be here and I will try in my limited to run through a little bit about untapped opportunities in Australia from a national innovation system.

Australian firms are exceedingly good at reactive problem solving. In other words, you come to them with a problem and they will solve it. They are very, very good at that, and the way I look at it from the outside is a kind of an overhang of the pride of the outback mechanic type thing, you know, you’re out there and your piece of wire and a bit of plywood and you can fix anything. It comes from that type of a survival type of view of the world.

Whereas if I go to the Germanic part of Europe, which by definition in the name itself means it centres around Germany, the strength is about strategic innovation, it’s about looking what is the problem that is worth solving for customers that have the need and the resources and then working long term towards that, whether the customer knows about it or not.

There’s something about high value thinking. Australia used to be a low cost environment, has over the last couple of years become a very high cost environment, and that means you have to move from cost based competition to value based competition which requires innovation and that transition, if you have a commodity mindset, is not that easy, but that operational basis has existed in Germany forever around a high cost successful industry.

There is something about the strategic innovation focus I mentioned, there is something about the global domination of small niches. We can learn an enormous amount from the German SMEs and Mittelstanden, how to actually take the 60-80% market share in something very narrow and really dominate that.

All weakness is a strength, the same as all strengths are weaknesses. Australia is the driest continent and South Australia is the driest state in the driest continent. That means that where is the highest skill on efficient water technology; it’s of course in that location. It follows naturally and there is a huge number of interesting technology, anything from genetic modification around wheat to make sure that it can grow on less water, all the way through to sophisticated systems and sensors to give the water at the right time, the cleaning issues and stuff like that, because without it there will be no water.

Through the Australian universities passes a huge number of students to come from India and China. I mean education is one of the biggest products of Australia, and that means that these are people who have come to Australia, they’ve lived there a number of years, they understand the Australian culture, they have Australian friends and they go back and they work with their skills in their home country. That is a huge network of straight opportunities into business in China and in India, and we’re starting to slowly now see the benefit of these things. I was in a meeting recently when a graduate of one of the South Australian universities starting what was ranked as one of the most fastest growing businesses in China – he was Chinese – and now he’s coming back and saying “Okay, I’d like to help you with some money. What do you want it for?” You know, it’s those type of linkages that are starting to turn up which are actually quite fundamental and are very important to link into if you want to get into the system. It’s shortcuts in a sense, the Guangxi problem in China and a short cut to the issue about trust and issues and that in India. And I can tell you, there is a huge opportunity around these things ready to go, it’s just they don’t have a partner, and they are proven in the area, they just need that industrial partner.

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