Innovation
Issue No. 40 - April/ /
Innovation Festival: Interesting times belong to us
Innovation is a word heard throughout SA as the state builds its capabilities to help meet the resources demands of the global economy and the high-tech requirements of the nation’s armed services.
However, with greater reliance than other Australian states on its manufacturing and agriculture sectors, and a rapidly growing services industry, SA is encouraging innovation across all industry sectors.
The 2008 Innovation Festival is a 4 weeks-long, national event but SA has more to be interested in than the rest of Australia and more reason to seize the opportunity to explore what others are doing, thinking and saying. Watch the website www.ausinnovation.org to see events added as the festival gets underway in April.
The SA Government is extremely eager to encourage innovation. The term is inserted as part of SA’s metadata code on every page of its strategy for economic development.
A focus of activity is the Centre for Innovation, established in 2005. It’s a collaboration of universities, industry groups, business and government. One of its mantras is that a business cannot expect to succeed in an increasingly competitive global economy without adherence to an innovation philosophy.
In recognising the critical importance of innovation, and giving it a top-tier priority in moving the local economy forward, the South Australian Government is intent on creating wealth for the benefit of the entire community. To help it reach this goal, it drew up a sophisticated mud map for the whole of the State … for government, for business and industry and for the community.
South Australia’s Strategic Plan was, in itself, an innovative policy step that set out the directions and provided a blueprint for the State to achieve the goals it was setting for itself. Innovation was identified as critical to the State’s economic future … and an innovation centre flowed naturally from the plan.
The Centre’s In...
