Craig, I fundamentally disagree with your tenet that the nurturing of imagination and the provision of a good education are all-important.

They are significant factors, but I think you’ve overstated them. Of course they need to be fostered. But look at the history of education and innovation. Where have they got us? They’re a mixed blessing. They have no doubt contributed to our improvements in life.... up to about the 70s. But beyond that, I doubt that they’ve led to real improvements for the average person. They have led directly to humanity getting grossly out of balance with the environment and resource base and into a now very precarious situation.

Good ideas that would have led to the development of human societies with an ongoing high quality of life that are in balance with their surroundings have basically BEEN IGNORED OR SUPPRESSED.

You, as the former Director General of the Queensland Dept of Environment and Heritage would surely know all about the essence of sustainability. So can I ask you; where in Rudd’s education program or in his methods of upholding rapid growth does the genuine sustainability of our society come into the picture?

Can you assert that Rudd’s education program will actually lead to significant improvements in the quality of education and the nurturing of imagination? Or will it predominantly lead to the provision of barely improved services for ever more people? With a considerably increased birthrate and an absurdly high immigration rate, MASSIVE expenditure will be needed just to break even.

Education and imagination are not the keys. The embracement of a new paradigm is the key. If we can get it through our thick heads that continuous expansionism is bullsh!t and sustainability is paramount, then everything will just flow from that. If we continue to embrace very rapid expansionism, no degree of improvement in education will help us.

My ideas are simpler.
Dump tech...the destroyer of a world.
Plant out the trees again and build simple clean villages and learn to appreciate and love Gods Creation all over again.

While new and creative ideas are good and necessary, they are insufficient to make a difference. The lion's share of the work is done at the interface between the idea and its working application.

As others here have said, innovation is a process. It starts with an idea, some sort of implementation or trial, refining, re-implementation and backtracking, which is all maintained by the human qualities of creativity, effort and perserverance. While Emerson's philosophical approach is right, it's a long way away from delivery of the full package.

While I'm in the mood, here's a couple of quotes from Louis Pasteur that were in reference to medical experimentation, but which could equally well be referred to innovation.

"No, a thousand times no, there is no such thing as a category of science called ‘applied science’. There is science, and there are the applications of science, and they are tied together as closely as the fruit and the tree that bears it."

"The great thing is to design experiments that are absolutely decisive, leaving nothing to the experimenter’s imagination. At the beginning of your research into any topic, imagination should give your thoughts wings. But at the conclusion, when you interpret the facts that your experiments have brought together, your imagination should be totally subordinated to your experimental findings."

Faustino
Thanks for your considered opinion. Golis' book is a good guide to financing ventures, particularly past-startup. I said 4 Ms before- there are actually 10 Ms (that I use in my innovation lectures)- won't go into detail here. Venture capital is a challenge,and needs to be kept in mind from the beginning. But to me the critical issue is getting ideas innovated that are worthy of VC. There has long been a disconnect between out ideas factories (CSIRO, Unis, Govt reserach agencies etc) and the marketplace. That is not to say that these institutions should be commercialised, but the need to be "outcome oriented" so that ideas are selected and directed towards application.

But we shouldn't just beat up on the unis- our major companies have been asleep at the wheel with regards to innovation, and have expected others to do the brainwork for them. Hopefully the revamped Cooperative Research Centres program will help.

But my main point is that we need an innovative culture, not just an inventive culture. That means many people- not just techies and accountants- exposed to the notion of "the process of transforming ideas into something useful".

Craig,

The problems you have identified stem from an education system that ostraises children rather than reward them for their creativity thereby crushing the very thing you espouse in your article.

The tendancy of most teachers is to create a classroom of sheep allowing ease of control and minimising the effort they would otherwise have to expend in the creative teaching of subjects.

Besides, those teachers are themelves the product of the system they implement. So the cycle is perpetuated ad infinitum.

In examining ideas for future prosperity&sustainability 2 key constraints must be weighed:

*You can't keep immigrating people into a people-caused climate-catastrophe & a people-gridlocked economic-recession.

*PEAKOIL is real. Current low prices are a chimera of desperate design by wealthy nations and must not be relied on in future planning.

Ideas are useless unless they come within the framework of a THERMODYNAMIC plan & a sustainable quality-population-policy.

If we can get the THERMODYNAMICS RIGHT, we have a chance to survive the next-20 PEAKOIL onset-years in tact.

The plan? KAEP…Kyoto(Kanberra for nationalistas) Alternative-Energy-Protocol…will ideate the THERMODYNAMIC solutions to challenges we face over the next 20 years.

KAEP:

1. A massive change of our energy source from OIL and Coal to 5Km deep Hot Rock Geothermal power. Also intense R&D of laser drilling& seismic telluric location technologies to facilitate this. Within 20 years we must be able to build 600MW Geothermal plants in 1 year and for 1/10th the cost of nuclear plants.

2. Construct 10’s of thousands of 1-2 acre ENGINEERED WETLANDS and restrict our populations to 21 million. This is necessary to protect ocean currents from heat capacity altering wastewater pollution. This will stop dangerous climate perturbations. The climate change bogey must be put to rest to free scientists & budgets to work on THERMODYNAMIC related objectives.

3. GPAL (Gun lift, 1-ton Packet switched, scramjet ASSIST, INCREMENTAL launch) space NETWORK program that seeks to sem-robotically create stable storage-platforms between Earth and the Mercury-Solar Lagrange point and transfer data, personnel and materiel between them much the same way as data packets are transferred around terrestrial data networks. Relying on foreign space-elevator concepts is premature. GPAL is right under our Aussie scramjet & PNG MtWilhelm launch pad noses.

4. NANOTECHNOLOGY. It is essential that nano-materials be MASS PRODUCED for a wide range of uses related to GPAL, and for some serious R&D of Rydberg states of matter vis-a-vis COLD FUSION.

FUNDING?
By a .5%GDP permanent hi-tech job-creational budget. It must have OPEN-NET-ACCESS for all Australians to participate. Even if that means exposing some GPAL secrets.

KAEP, being low-ENTROPY&HIGH-ORDER will super-generate new ideas.