Hidden in Plain Sight: the new book for people who have to decide what to do next

2 hours ago

6 min read

John H Howard, 3 November, 2026

An abridged version of this Insight was published in InnovationAus on 2 November, 2026

When Cathy Foley’s team at CSIRO built a superconducting sensor that could detect ore bodies conventional instruments missed, they had a world-leading piece of science. What they did not have was a product.

It took about twelve years, and a succession of engineers, geophysicists, software developers, industry partners and investors, before an exploration company would buy LANDTEM and take it into the field.

Dr Foley tells that story in her Foreword to Hidden in Plain Sight: How places create value from innovation, released by Acton Institute Publishing on 22 October 2026. It is the book’s argument in one case example.

Australia is well supplied with breakthroughs. What decides whether they become businesses, jobs and exports is everything that has to be assembled around them; that is the part of the system this country has found hardest to see and hardest to build.

Hidden in Plain Sight is available at the Amazon Bookstore in Paperback and Kindle. It is Book 5 in the Acton Institute’s Thinking in Public series.

A familiar diagnosis, and a different question

For close to twenty years, Australian policy reports have told the same story: strong research, comparatively low business spending on research and development, thin collaboration and uneven adoption across firms and industries.

The diagnosis has been remarkably stable. The Strategic Examination of Research and Development restated it in 2026. But the prognosis has not changed.

Hidden in Plain Sight sets that diagnosis to one side and asks a more practical question. What arrangements or “complements" allow the capability to be put to use, and what can a decision maker do when those arrangements are missing?

The answers turn out to be harder to see than laboratories and graduates: the complements a technology depends on before it generates value, the standing that leads talent and investors to choose one place over another, and the capacity to keep those relationships working when conditions change.

The book gives particular attention to the role of innovation places (regions, districts, precincts and hubs) in assembling those complements.

The title borrows from Nesta’s idea of "hidden innovation", the activity that the usual indicators overlook. The book takes the idea a step further, from the activity to the arrangements through which innovation ecosystems put capability to use.

Three principles, one argument

Three ideas run through the book and connect the analysis of places to decisions about them.

Complementarity is the diagnostic principle. Research depends on the capacity to absorb it, capital on management and technology on skills.

Pouring more into a capability that is already abundant is unlikely to lift performance while a necessary complement is absent. The practical task is to find the complement that is “rate-limiting” in a particular place, at its current stage of development, and act on that.

Conferral explains why the holders of those complements choose one place over another. Association with a respected institution or person can change how customers, investors and regulators regard a young firm, quite apart from any practical help it receives.

That is why talent and money commit early to some ecosystems while others with comparable capability wait years for recognition.

Resilience is about time. Supply chains, energy systems and geopolitics can undo an arrangement that suited an earlier decade. Reslience lets participants recognise those changes early and the means to respond.

The three principles are the channels through which the people and organisations in a place turn capability into outcomes.

Productivity is the outcome governments and investors most often ask for. But places also delver valuable outcomes in the form of public health, community development, socio-cultural and public policy impacts.

Built to be used, not just read

Hidden in Plain Sight is a field guide, written for people who need to make decisions: policymakers and advisers, the practitioners who run districts and programs, venture investors, and the universities, hospitals and corporates that anchor precincts and govern them.

Each of the thirty-two chapters stands on its own, restating what it needs from elsewhere in the book and pointing to where each idea is developed in full, so a reader can go straight to the chapter that bears on their problem.

Every chapter opens with a note on where its material came from and a proposition the evidence could support or qualify.

That is the method of applied policy analysis: a decision maker can act on a proposition before the evidence is complete, provided the evidence that would prove it wrong is known in advance. In several chapters, the evidence qualifies the proposition, and the book says so.

The contents at a glance

The Seven Indicator Assessment Framework (Chapter 9), which rates a place’s shared computing and data assets, test beds and sandboxes, skills supply, translational capability, procurement pathways, intellectual property and data governance, and systems integration capacity, and uses the weakest indicator, not a composite score, to show where to act.
Seven pathways by which districts form and four genesis models for the firms within them (Chapters 10 and 11), so that a strategy can be matched to the pathway a place is actually on before the instruments are chosen.
A chapter on each of the complements that most often constrain Australian ecosystems, namely connection, talent, intermediation, finance and management (Chapters 15 to 19), with what each requires to be built and kept in operation.
The early decisions on land, labour, procurement and custody that decide who benefits from a district and whether its arrangements survive a change of program or leadership (Chapters 20 to 22).
A test of the three principles against artificial intelligence (Chapters 23 to 27), including the fifty-year Australian positioning story and a plain account of why board caution on AI is well founded when it sequences commitment instead of avoiding it.
A comparison of eight coordination models, a specification of what orchestration actually involves, a field scan of Australia’s translational institutes and a practitioner’s test for any regional arrangement before relying on it (Chapters 28 to 32).
Conclusions organised by the organisation with authority to act, six changes that look feasible in the short to medium term, and seven appendices including the diagnostic matrix, the verification method and the full table of propositions.

Where the evidence comes from

The book’s reasoning is inductive and inferential, built from a case base of more than 110 ecosystem profiles developed over the last three years, around twenty districts studied in depth in Europe and the Nordic countries in May and June 2026, and a field scan of thirty-three Australian research entities that perform a translational function.

An evidential and deductive approach is also taken, drawing on the literature on complementary assets, legitimacy and status, general-purpose technologies and regional development, and on twenty-five years of research and advisory work on university-business engagement, knowledge transfer and the place of universities in society.

Each chapter grew out of the weekly Innovation Insights of the past year, each prompted by a question from someone facing a real decision about a precinct, a program or a firm. Readers of those Insights will recognise some of the material. They will also find it tested against the case base, cross-referenced and tied to the propositions the book adopts.

Case examples illustrate and test the argument within the limits of comparative fieldwork; they do not settle it as a controlled study might, and the book is explicit about the evidence that would require each principle to be revised.

What the book finds

Across this evidence, coordination and capability have constrained progress more often than a shortage of money. Responsibility for moving a working result towards a paying customer is frequently unfunded.
Management depth in medium-sized firms is the constraint that turns up most consistently across the cases, and it gets comparatively little attention in policy.
Some Australian research institutes already do what the Fraunhofer institutes and Catapult centres do overseas, but without a category, a funding model or a policy identity of their own.
Distribution has to be settled early, before land values rise.

These findings point to decisions that existing organisations can take, with the authority they already have. That is the book's purpose: to move the national conversation from describing what is wrong to specifying what a particular decision maker can do, and how.

Readers who want to get straight into the book should start with the Executive summary and the book-on-a-page figure, then turn to Chapter 9, the chapter most likely to be used first.

Hidden in Plain Sight: How places create value from innovation (Acton Institute Publishing, 2026). Thirty-two chapters, eight Parts, seventy tables, forty figures and thirty-eight propositions. Paperback and Kindle at https://amzn.asia/d/0crPsXSh.