AI becomes productive when firms complement it with skills, quality data, management capability and supporting institutions. Turning AI into Productivity draws on a case base of 110 place-based innovation ecosystems and four weeks of site visits to show where Australia is strong, where the gaps are, what seven recommendations could do to capture the opportunities, and how they could be implemented. A UTS research project funded by the Google Foundation. Available from the Ama

Australia’s Strategic Examination of Research and Development explained what is wrong with the national R&D system, why reform is needed and how the system could be fixed. It did not explain how its recommendations would be implemented. In this new book, John H Howard examines how the SERD review lost its way and identifies the institutional machinery required to turn diagnosis into durable reform.

Australian research and innovation policy keeps funding a program and expecting an ecosystem to grow where the money lands. The two are different instruments doing different things. A competitive, time-limited, university-led grant is built for accountability and speed, while a durable, demand-led collaboration is built for density and patience. Using the Trailblazer Universities Program and the CRC record, this Insight sets out four questions that settle the choice before mo

Innovation policy is good at counting the flows and poor at seeing the stock beneath them. Research spending, patents and publications record a year of activity, while the accumulated capacity that makes it productive, metros and rail, digital networks and data centres, skills and public space, goes uncounted. That stock is the necessary condition for an ecosystem to perform, and the same gap now shapes the AI question, since AI pays off only where the complementary stock is

Resilience now guides Australian economic and industrial policy. This Innovation Insight draws on evidence from 109 innovation ecosystems across 35 countries to show that resilience is a designable property of innovation and industrial ecosystems, built through anchors, governance, ownership and infrastructure. It closes with an agenda for the new National Science and Resilience Council.

The Sydney Plan places Bradfield beside the Sydney CBD and Parramatta as an anchor of the metropolitan economy. Drawing on more than ninety case studies behind The Handbook of Innovation Ecosystems, this Insight sets out what the international evidence says about the places that succeed, how ecosystems create value through productivity, resilience and conferral, and the three questions the Bradfield Development Authority now needs to answer about vision, integration and lived

When Senator Tim Ayres speaks of resilience, he means the capacity to keep functioning when the world does not cooperate, anchored in a robust industrial base. This Insight places that reading at the centre of the post-2020 turn in industrial policy and asks how it works alongside productivity and competitiveness. The answer lies in design: resilience investments that supply the complements firms need, and capabilities kept at home that also differentiate Australia in interna

The Great Western Royal Hotel, now the Hilton London Paddington, opened in 1854 as part of Brunel's plan for a single journey linking hotel, railway and steamship. The building illustrates the complementarity principle in two dimensions. Functional complements build capability and performance. Reputational complements, or conferral, build credibility and attraction. Australian precinct policy attends closely to the first and much less to the second. Lasting advantage appears

Has resilience displaced innovation as the organising idea in Australia’s science, technology and innovation policy? Guest writer Rajesh Gopalakrishnan Nair suggests the proposed Resilience and Science Council marks this policy turn. In this extended essay, Rajesh traces the resilience narrative from Federation to the present and argues that the neoclassical reading of resilience, a bounce back to equilibrium, may cost Australia the innovation policy that Ambitious Australia

Every strong innovation ecosystem visited during the UTS research project runs dedicated translation centres. When practitioners across fourteen European and Nordic ecosystems were asked how AI actually reaches ordinary companies, they pointed to these centres rather than universities or government programs. Drawing on Fraunhofer, DFKI, Brainport, VTT and the Cambridge IfM, this working paper asks what translation centres do, why the strongest look alike, and what their absen

Data centres are landing across Australian cities and regions as the largest private-capital commitments in a generation. The government's March 2026 Expectations document asks operators to build local research, innovation and capability as a condition of their social licence. The intent is sound; the mechanism is missing. Graham Christie sets out one candidate, a partner-led Community TechHub built alongside each new campus, that could turn a compliance line into measurable

Technological progress rarely eliminates human value. It moves it. Each wave of innovation makes some capabilities abundant and others scarce. The value of a general-purpose technology sits in its complements: data, skills, workflows, governance and judgement. EMI invented the CT scanner and lost the market. Kodak invented the digital camera and went bankrupt. AI repeats the pattern, and who captures its value will turn on who builds the complements. The implications reach bu

Electricity took forty years to remake manufacturing, and the delay lay outside the technology: in factories, management and the institutions of trust. Industrial AI is on the same path. The Hugging Face intrusion exposed a missing complement in security assurance, and the 2008 financial crisis shows how systemic trust withdraws all at once when assurance fails. Board caution is rational; the task for policy is to build the assurance institutions early, before trust fails rat

Every occupation shortage list asks how many extra people are needed. None asks how much of the shortfall AI will absorb. The US, UK and EU now build AI assumptions into their employment projections. Australia's JSA publishes a disclaimer instead. Craig Fowler argues the SSN-AUKUS submarine build at Osborne is the proving ground: within one postcode it holds some of the least automatable trades in the economy and some of the most exposed program-office work. Net-of-AI forecas

Many of the districts that turn research into production grow on a city's edge, around a university campus, an advanced-industry base, or a major item of public infrastructure. Drawing on a 2026 UTS study of European and Nordic ecosystems, this Insight examines Eindhoven, Dortmund, Kaiserslautern, Munich, and Stockholm. It sets out a policy architecture of seven interacting components, and asks what the record means for Australia's next generation of precincts.

Boards have a library of AI guidance, and almost all of it concerns risk, controls and compliance. Almost none addresses the question a board exists to answer: how should this organisation use AI to create new value? This Insight examines why the imbalance is built into who writes the guidance and how liability works, what a compliance-first approach costs, and what the missing guidance would say. It proposes a five-domain framework for governing the upside with the same rigo

General-purpose AI is a name that captures raw capabilities: models, compute, and data centres. Industrial AI names that capability once an economy has built the complements around it through redesigned work, new skills, better data and supporting institutions. This working paper explains why productivity gains have been slow to appear, examines Australia's data centre investment debate, and sets out what the Commonwealth, the states and businesses can do to turn AI capabilit

Across 45 days of site visits in Europe and Scandinavia, one feature stood out in every productive innovation ecosystem: industry, universities and government work together as a matter of habit. In Australia the three pillars run in parallel, rarely meeting and often wary of one another. This Insight asks whether that Triple Helix deficit helps explain why business R&D stays so low, why global research-intensive firms anchor their advanced work elsewhere, and what a remedy mi

John H. Howard, April 2026 Australian research and innovation policy is again debating what universities are for. The Strategic Examination of Research and Development has placed translation, impact, and engagement at the centre of the conversation, while university leaders defend traditional research strengths against shifting funding signals. Beneath these debates sits a more fundamental question. What counts as scholarship, and how should it be assessed? Ernest Boyer aske

Australia already has many of the institutional ingredients needed for effective innovation ecosystem development. The problem is coordination. This Insight suggests a new Australian Innovation and Industrial Strategy Commission designed around Cabinet authority, statutory coordination, and federal engagement. Drawing on overseas experience and Australia’s constitutional realities, it argues for a practical model that aligns innovation, industry, research, and place-based dev