Society Fellow, Emeritus Professor Roy Green AM FRSN, of the University of Technology Sydney and a CSIRO Board member, delivered the keynote address at the 2024 Pearcey Foundation National Awards in Melbourne on 19 November.

His talk reflected on the progress of science and technology, how it shapes our world, and the importance to Australia of developing a homegrown innovation capability. He spoke of the challenges to Australia in its narrow trade and industrial structure, based largely on the export of unprocessed raw materials, leading to our ranking in the Harvard Atlas of Economic Complexity dropping to 102 out of 133 counties, and now behind Argentina and Bangladesh.

This stalled productivity and wage stagnation that afflicts Australia necessitates the reinvigoration of Australia’s fragmented and underfunded research and innovation system as part of a national industrial strategy, he argued, speaking of the opportunities associated with quantum computing and the clean energy transition.

Professor Green noted that while the Commonwealth Government is embarking on a ‘strategic examination’ of how declining business and public investment in R&D can be reversed, including through the growth of collaborative place-based innovation ecosystems, the real task involves the creation of a motivating vision of change and the challenge of making this a practical reality.

The article in AuManufacturing provides a comprehensive summary of Professor Green’s presentation.