TheThreePercent

We interrupt the series on ‘managing collaborative innovation’ to showcase the following quote in Australia’s most recent government review of their ‘innovation system.’  Yeah, don’t ask me why they insist on calling it a system.  A lot of my friends down there think it’s an absurd way to characterize things, too.  Still, they did mention the value of the intermediated approach to open innovation:

“Australia’s innovation policy needs to balance investment
in increasing the supply of knowledge from science
and research with increasing the capacity of Australian
enterprises to receive, absorb and take up such knowledge.

An example of this flows from the asymmetry of knowledge.
It is not uncommon that two firms could enhance their joint
value by combining their ideas and information but do not do
so either because they are not aware of the other’s knowledge,
or the risk involved in revealing their own information to
another party is too great. This can be overcome through
the use, for example, of trusted intermediaries, a concept
that grew out of the open innovation work in the US (brought to
Australia through the InnovationXchange). The
practice is now being exported to other parts of the world
in a broadening network of genuine operational innovation.
Exposing more firms to this sort of service, and mindset, could
have significant value for the nation as well as the firms.”

(http://www.innovation.gov.au/innovationreview/Pages/home.aspx)