Australia, we can lead the world.

As I sat around the table last night, we got to the tenth person down the table, and Emma said, "Wow, I'm just so inspired by what I just heard, and we have heard all women speak"!

This was a dinner to discuss how Australia can unlock its innovation for a future economy that is an almighty powerhouse on the global stage. Paula has extrapolated the data from the Global Innovation Index reports, and if Australia were to be as innovative as Israel, over fourteen years, this would be a $580Bn positive impact on our Australian economy.

Now I respect Dom Price at Atlassian, and I admire the work he does both in Future of Work and also being vulnerable as a leader. What I don't like is his comments towards my 'innovation theatre', because yes, that hurts. As someone who was a successful bootstrapped entrepreneur for one decade, I think I earned my stripes. I trademarked an executive search service into a Search360 product and sold it to the likes of Deloitte, Booz&Company, AGL, KPMG, EY, nab etc, so I know applied business innovation is in my blood. I also co-created a governance product that empowered 36% of our then 400 Future Directors alumni onto a board within 6 months at a median age of 34, and I co-created a startup governance framework with a veteran AICD facilitator that was delivered to over 200 Founders that received a 4.6/5 rating. And nowadays I empower my industry and government clients to execute open innovation, of which we are able to display actual ROI and value within their reporting and share the data with their Executives and often boards (some have delivered $18M of value to their business in just one year, for the purchase of a less than a six-figure product). So yes, Dom you hit a nerve, but this sort of "innovation theatre" talk is exactly the reason Australia is not performing (as well as it should be). I say all of this, because sometimes we need to start a fight! Australia seems to have lost its fight, it's BAU is damn boring so let's learn to fight again. Let us fight to ignite a better future!

If you have ever been so fortunate to look into Uluru and experience the spiritual connection to our Great Land, then you know we are both a lucky country, and we are also an abundant nation, in both land and opportunity! We have some of the finest species in the world and the Frilled Neck Lizard (Dragon) is one of my favourite, I love it's frill that announces its excitement and it surely is captivating. We have so much beauty and creativity in our ecosystems but I fear sometimes we're just garden skinks hiding beneath the sleepers.

I question that if we are an abundant nation, then why do we not invest in our creativity?

After all, it is creativity, new business models and new market entry that put Rio Tinto, BHP, Linfox, and now Atlassian, Canva and Afterpay on the global stage! We have creativity in abundance, but sometimes we don't have the mid-zone business strategists and financial analysts to support the ideas with robust business cases. Our safety net is our weakness and we know we were risk takers, so we need to lean in to that courage that got us on the global stage in the first place.

Last night we had twenty diverse leaders around a dinner table discussing a problem statement,

"How might we progress Australia's innovation from 25th on the global innovation index to the top 10?"

The room had so much energy, I thought the solar rooftop was going to blow off! And yes, we do have more solar rooftops per capita than anywhere in the world, so that's a start. But our government agencies and industry are mostly laggards except for "cloud" after the KPMG Industrial Revolution 4.0 report that was delivered yesterday. We invented solar. We create a lot of the world's energy, we led the world in superannuation (pension funds) transformation, we have delivered some of the most sustainable PPP infrastructure assets, we did some of the first carbon futures deals, we created a new way for the world to deliver seamless project management, rather than gantt charts, kudos Dom and company, we reinvented design for all, and we also created the world's greatest buy now, pay later platform. What can we do next?

So last night, as a collective intelligence, we had some amazing ideas, one that is brewing is to measure and manage Australia's innovation. Because like Peter Drucker once said, "What gets measured, gets managed".

If you've got ideas on how we can better execute Innovation Australia, we'd love to hear from you. The next dinner in early 2022 will be yet another inspiring and creative evening. Watch out for the story cubes, it might just unlock the kid in you =)

Fun fact: Did you know a 4-year old laughs 300 times per day, yet a 40-year old laughs 300 times over 2 months? Maybe we should play with those story cubes more often Professor Finbar?