Minister Ayres's National Press Club address draws selectively on the SERD's Ambitious Australia report to support a broader industrial policy agenda. The report's proposed SRI architecture is largely absent. R&D is positioned as one of the instruments in a reindustrialisation. The broader innovation system, including management capability, absorptive capacity, and place-based ecosystems, is unaddressed at this stage. No doubt, more is coming on actions and initiatives.

Australia's SERD report, Ambitious Australia, strengthens the research system but treats it as though it were the innovation system. This Innovation Insight argues for two shifts: defining innovation as the successful application of new ideas rather than production of research outputs, and widening the frame beyond science and technology to include creative practice, social innovation and place-based ecosystems. Firms, users and places, not universities alone, should be at th

The Denholm Review presents Australia’s innovation system as a reinforcing flywheel coordinating research, firms, and growth. This Insight challenges that framing. It argues that the central constraint is the absence of strong market formation, capital depth, and global integration. Without these, policies risk improving internal coherence while failing to generate globally competitive outcomes. The question is whether Australia is building a system it can manage, or one that

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt for showing the role of public investment in innovation for economic growth. The award signals the formal absorption of innovation into the mainstream neoclassical economic paradigm. While this marks a watershed moment, it also raises questions about intellectual lineage and disciplinary boundaries. This 'paradigm capture' may now create direct competition for the heterodox