How to address a Chief Scientist

Unfortunately I had to sit through a few speeches last night. Fortunately I was allowed to clutch a beer and I also had my phone with me, so it wasn’t all bad.

One of the speeches was by the Chief Scientist (sic) of New South Wales. She must have some Indian scientists in her employee maybe?

She said something very odd … she said that we in Australia (or was it NSW?) have all the ‘inputs’ for great innovation but none of the ‘outputs’.

I don’t think she was offering any solutions to this so-called ‘root cause’ analysis (to the problem of a lack of an innovative high tech exporting sector?) other than to imply that a good start was the current offering (namely the awards that were being handed out to former female graduates in engineering from the UNSW that were currently employed at sexy work environments such as UNSW, Rio Tinto or Sydney Water).

In any case, just for the record, O’ Chief Scientist of NSW, the reason why we don’t have measurable outcomes in the so-called innovation scale is because we hardly have any of the required inputs.

Specifically we lack these ‘input’ features:

1. A culture of very large investments of risk capital into start-ups or any other risky ventures apart from digging or pumping stuff out of the ground

2. A university sector that is a sandpit for proven or upcoming high-tech entrepreneurs and not a sheltered workshop for citation-mad self-aggrandizing academics

3. An economic and political system that is free of the dead hand of entrenched oligarchies and their third-rate management cultures

4. An employment environment that attracts our best and brightest to the innovation sectors. They all go to the professional services and the finance sector

5. A patent granting system and patent enforcement system that offers large damages to patent owners for infringement and assumes that the patent office is better at judging the merits of a patent than a judge

6. Chief Technologists at the federal and state government level that aren’t scientists and aren’t former academics, and that actually develop real policies that are implemented rather than spend their times handing out awards

6. Media commentary that is in any way critical of our innovation and tech sectors rather than simply bleating on about half-baked ‘success’ stories that are either complete fabrications or ‘gunnas’

Other than, it’s all good!