GrowinG Future innovators - ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative ...

7 Commonwealth of
Australia (2001), see also
Commonwealth of Australia
(2004)
8 Innovation Summit
Implementation Group
(2000)
9 for details on the history of
Australia’s innovation policy,
see Bryant et al. (1996) and
Timpson & Rudder (2005)
10 Cutler in DIISR (2008:2)
11 Senator Kim Carr in
Commonwealth of Australia
(2009:iii)
12 Godin (2008)
13 Cunningham (2008),
Haseman & Jaaniste (2008),
Jaaniste (2009a)
In Australia the growth of the innovation
agenda has paralleled global trends. Having
emerged as an overt public policy platform in
the 1990s, it increased greatly in importance
in the 2000s. The landmark national policy
moment was the release of the Howard
government’s multi-billion dollar Backing
Australia’s ability in 2001, 7 which was released
after the National Innovation Summit 8 held in
Canberra the previous year. Since then, the
government has led several rounds of national
innovation reports, policies and inquiries.
With the change of government in 2007
came the Review of the National Innovation
System (RNIS), which resulted in the
Venturous Australia report in 2008, followed
by the government response Powering ideas
in 2009. 9 Within these two reports, the
importance of innovation was again reiterated:
There are few subjects more central and
fundamental to Australia’s economic, social
and environmental future than innovation.
(Terry Cutler) 10
Innovation is not an abstraction. Nor is it
an end itself. It is how we make a better
Australia, and contribute to making a better
world—a prosperous, fair and decent world,
in which everyone has the chance of a
fulfilling life.
(Senator Carr) 11
Despite sweeping statements and universal
sentiments, mainstream innovation theory
and policy has, however, focused narrowly
on science and technology. As Godin 12
reveals, in the first half of the twentieth
century, innovation came to be thought of
in purely instrumentalist terms: innovation
as useful, technological, commercial, and
organisationally managed change. This focus
arose from the coalescence of scientific
research policy (from the 1940s) and
technological industrial policy (from the
1960s). After two world wars, scientific and
technological innovation was highly promoted
in the United States, and then Europe, as a
means to rebuild, feed and nurture a nation.
When innovation policy became an overt and
globally pursued policy platform in the 1990s,
science and technology were synonymous
with research and innovation. Likewise, over
the years, innovation studies has matured as
a sub-sector of studies in science, technology
and economics. This perspective, however, is
now changing.
1.2 A widening horizon:
the rise of the creativity and
innovation agenda
While mainstream innovation policy and
studies retain a somewhat narrow focus,
the interest in innovation has spread across
many sectors and people—the outcome of
what might be called an expanded creativity
and innovation agenda. Put simply, innovation
and its typical concerns (industry, science and
research, enterprise, knowledge and largescale
systems) are now intermingling with
creativity and its typical concerns (arts and
culture, communal and personal expression,
imagination and aesthetics).
The overlap of various key terms has facilitated
this shift (however, care is needed here,
because terms like ‘creativity’, ‘innovation’,
‘design’ and ‘culture’ can mean quite different
things within different domains). New media
convergences have also been influential.
The internet and other online platforms
have opened up a range of ways in which
governments connect with the public, in which
communities form and mobilize, and in which
knowledge or soft media is created, shared and
traded. Within this social and technological
context, inter-disciplinary knowledge and
inter-cultural connections abound.
As a result, the two distinct ‘poles’ of the
creativity and innovation agenda—arts
and culture on the one hand, and science
and technology on the other—have been
gradually approaching one another within
policy, academic and public platforms. 13
For the STEM sector (science, technology,
engineering and medicine), creativity and
innovation is often orientated around new
ideas and enterprise. The term creativity
traditionally implies the production of new
ideas for scientific research and socioeconomic
problem solving while innovation
relates to the application and implementation
of new ideas as patents, manufactured
goods and technical services. However, this
focus is now beginning to broaden in several
ways, including:
The recognition that complex problems
cannot be solved by science and technology
sectors alone. Innovation systems thinking
has revealed that the interaction of
many sorts of people, skills and practices
Growing future Innovators: a scoping study 11