In a room full of suits Bill Ferris stands out, because his hair is so blond and, often, so are his suits. They match his reputation for urbanity, philanthropy and business derring-do as the gentleman father of Australian venture capital. He made his fortune at CHAMP Private Equity transforming companies to sell at a profit, including Seek, Looksmart and Austar.
Yet for one so practised in the art of the multimillion-dollar dazzle, Ferris has a knack of aligning himself with activities which have become dirty words to large sections of the Australian voting public. He wrote a tell-all book about his business successes and failures called Inside Private Equity as part of his mission to rescue the industry from its bad name.
Now, as the inaugural chair of Innovation and Science Australia, he's turning his formidable sales skills to innovation. He'll need them. The public delivered its verdict on Malcolm Turnbull's "ideas boom" by almost chucking him out of office. When the Prime Minister spoke innovation and jobs during the election campaign, voters saw robots and job losses. And no wonder: the Committee for Economic Development of Australia has warned of the "high probability that 40 per cent of Australia's workforce, more than 5 million people, could be replaced by automation within the next 10 years".
Arthur Sinodinos' career has been revived from a near-death experience with ICAC, making him the third minister in the Innovation and Science portfolio since Turnbull launched the ideas boom in December 2015. He reportedly wants to simplify the message from abstract to practical, so people can understand how innovation helps businesses create jobs and become wealthier.
Ferris' job as ISA chair is to advise the government on how Australia should should translate groundbreaking ideas into world-beating businesses, as well as sell the vision to the public. The excitement and importance of innovation is a story yet to be properly told in Australia, he says, and there is a "lack of urgency and understanding about this national mission".
"Yes, there are some jobs to be at risk, but also a whole pile of jobs to be created." It may be cold comfort, but "one thing is certain, if we don't embrace and be in front of the bus of new technologies, there will be less jobs than there would be otherwise", says Ferris.
Like all good stories, it starts with the bad stuff first, though there's no guarantee of a happy ending. ISA has just delivered a 200-plus page report to government that says we do badly at the stuff we need to be best at. "Prolonged stagnation" lies ahead if we don't get it together pretty soon. It's sugar-coated, of course – the report notes Australians are "incredibly talented and industrious people". On average we enjoy "some of the longest lives, best-quality services and most liveable communities in the world". And didn't we bring the world wi-fi, black box flight recorders, cochlear implants, dual-flush toilets, and so much more?
But the buts are big. ISA put some metrics together to compare our innovation performance with other advanced economies. In large part, it's not how we like to see ourselves. In the ranking for creating fast-growing businesses, we are stone cold last. We scored a dismal 0.8 on this, compared with an average of 13.5 for the top five ranked countries in the world.
Only 9 per cent of Australian firms introduce products that are truly new to market, but in the top five countries the proportion is 21 per cent. Our businesses employ about a third as many researchers as their counterparts in the top five performing nations. Our school system is "significantly underperforming" against other countries in science and maths education. We are achieving multifactor productivity change – that is, growth stemming from knowledge creation instead of just getting more out of capital and labour – at less than a third of the rate of the top five performing nations.
On the plus side, we rank third among nations for the number of researchers in universities and the public sector, and their research is highly cited by other researchers around the world. We also have a "vibrant and healthy attitude to risk" and "excellent research infrastructure assets".
"As a nation we are very inventive. We are generally seen not just by ourselves, but by international observers and commentators, as really doing a pretty fine job at creating stuff," says Ferris.
A key problem is that the researchers in universities and government agencies such as the CSIRO, and the businesses who can adapt their ideas to market, don't get together nearly enough. It's "a silo approach, the academics sit over there, the businesses sit over here", says Ferris. By contrast, in the startup hotspots of Silicon Valley or Tel Aviv, collaborative projects and the regular exchange of executives between academia and business are part of the culture. "We are not there and we need to be," says Ferris.
We have the fourth highest proportion of innovative small and medium enterprises among the advanced nations, but "the vast majority of innovation introduced by Australian businesses has a low degree of novelty". In other words, we are "failing to capitalise on above average performance in knowledge creation", says Ferris.
The report feeds into the strategic plan for Australia's innovation, science and research system through to 2030, which ISA is due to deliver to government later this year. But Ferris allows himself a preliminary recommendation. The findings make one thing very clear, he says: "We need to significantly lift our game if we want to be a top tier innovation nation."