Australia’s innovation capability is visible and counted. What is harder to see are the arrangements that allow a place to put that capability to use. This Insight introduces Hidden in Plain Sight, released 22 October 2026, and opens a series that follows the book’s argument Part by Part.

Since 2000, successive national reviews of Australia’s research and innovation system have reached the same diagnosis and proposed the same remedies, each presented as new. What they share is a near silence on execution. This Insight traces how implementation knowledge was displaced from the public service and never acquired by the scientists, economists and business advocates who write innovation policy, and sets out what the next review can do differently.

Australian innovation policy needs a fuller picture of how research reaches practical use. This Innovation Insight examines the limits of counting funding programs, translation activity within universities and public research bodies and the contribution of states and territories. Drawing on Ambitious Australia, it argues that national priorities should begin with available capability and be developed through partnerships that connect funding, institutions and the instruments