For winners at the recent Australian Computer Society (ACS) Digital Disruptors Awards 2016, the general consensus was Australia needs to do a lot more if it wants to be a leader in the new digital economy.
Our problem is governments and business tend to enjoy saying the word disruption and innovation but generally do not follow through.
ICT Professional of the Year, Dr Kate Raynes-Goldie, asked why we do not take the gaming industry seriously considering it is a massive global industry and does not require huge research investment.
Founder of PIPE Networks, serial start-up investor and the 2016 Pearcey Foundation Medallist Steve Baxter agreed and asked why so much is invested in research we deem as worthy rather than just looking at the bottom-line.
"Governments should be about jobs so what should they do? Do more research or be more entrepreneurial?" he asks.
"We constantly use throwaway terms like innovation and disruption but they're just a new way of doing things. The world is coming for us and we can't ignore it by building a regulatory moat around Australia. What we need to do is to communicate the importance of change without talking down to people.
"Politicians are universally poor at explaining things and so are our PhD researchers."
Teaching business acumen
Baxter, who is also one of the "sharks" on Network Ten's Shark Tank, believes we just have to be more entrepreneurial and better teach young people a little about business acumen.
"Universities are the most unauthentic enterprise environments out there so we need to give people some more business skills. We need to invest in start-ups and increase the number of high-tech businesses.
"We can't expect research to be a wellspring of economic activity," he says.
Also speaking at the awards, NSW Minister for Innovation and Better Regulation, Victor Dominello, spoke of the challenges inside government and how he is confronting them through a range of initiatives designed to bring NSW forward as a smarter, more digitally-focused state.
One winner on the night who worked closely with a government department was cmee4 productions and its Sound Scouts offering. Sound Scouts bagged the Gold Disruptor Service Transformation for the Digital Consumer (Corporate).
Developed in collaboration with the National Acoustic Laboratories and supported by NSW Health, Sound Scouts will make hearing testing accessible to all children, ensuring they are ready, and able, to learn.
Sound Scouts utilises game play to gather rich data that is analysed to determine the state of a child's hearing. Played on a tablet with a set of headphones it can be supervised by any responsible adult. Like a genie in a bottle, Sound Scouts is akin to an audiologist in a tablet, the expertise is built in.
Winning app improves safety
Other winners on the night included employment services company Seek, which picked up a gong for Skills Transformation for Work Teams (Medium), and Qantas, which picked up the Skills Transformation for Work Teams (Small).
Qantas picked up its award for an app developed to improve the critical process of baggage handling.
According to Qantas program manager Blake Millard, the app automated a lot of manual processes and has also provided a number of reporting advantages that enabled Qantas to better allocate resources and improve safety.
"Drivers who would have previously been idle and waiting for a delayed flight could be redeployed to other tasks thereby reducing inefficiencies. As a result, we drove down costs and safety issues relating to bag loading decreased since the introduction of the app," Millard says.
Moreover, the success of the app has prompted the service provider to market the product internationally to other airlines.