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The launch of the federal government’s Innovation and Science Agenda was met with great fanfare. But, with great expectation comes a great responsibility to deliver. Tuesday’s budget is the government’s opportunity to honour its innovation pledge and ensure the long term economic prosperity of Australia.

According to CSIRO, Australia will need to retrain six  million people to become digitally literate by 2025 if we’re going to have any hope of competing on the international stage and successfully pivoting to a knowledge economy.

In order to turn the vision into reality, the budget will need to focus efforts on three key areas; the huge skills and talent shortage, research commercialisation, and making government the blueprint for successful digital disruption.

Address our skills shortage with urgency  

The most pressing issue we face today is solving the immediate skills shortage.  Internationally competitive companies are recruiting ‘10xers’, a terma used to describe extremely talented individuals who can increase business outcomes by 10 fold. 10xers are the secret sauce behind the success of startups like Facebook, Google, Apple and Salesforce.

The challenge for  Australian government and business is to develop a local ecosystem that attracts world class talent. A policy the government should consider is a multilateral visa, providing entrepreneurs with the freedom to move between international economies like Canada, United Kingdom and New Zealand.

The freedom to travel will undoubtedly encourage knowledge sharing and allow entrepreneurs the freedom to collaborate, as well as help develop consistent policy settings between these jurisdictions. Flexibility around the visa scheme is critical to creating an effective, global knowledge economy which promotes growth and new jobs.

Another policy example is the recently announced Startup Queensland’s $24 million initiative to encourage national and global startups to relocate to Queensland. This a bold lever to showcase Queensland as a gateway for startups to access the Asia Pacific market, and to attract world class talent to build their own local ecosystem.

Despite a strong growth in demand for skills, there is a projected gap of more than 100,000 IT workers in the next five years. It’s important we understand the innovation boom won't solely rely on universities, but will draw on the vocational education sector’s role to re-skill existing workers.

The long term skills challenge lies developing our best and brightest young minds. It’s important we don't apply a giant blanket approach to reskilling our children with an entirely STEM focused lens, but we invest in programs to ensure arts subjects are embedded in a program that rewards creativity.

Commercialise research

Investment in programs that reward and encourage collaboration between the  private sector and universities is critical to delivering on the vision of a knowledge economy.

Australian research is recognised as being world leading, yet Australia  ranks near the bottom of the OECD group of advanced economies in terms of collaboration between its university research sector and business, particularly small to medium enterprises. It’s a sobering statistic and one that the private sector has a responsibility to improve.

A recent success story is the collaboration between La Trobe University’s Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre (OTARC) and Salesforce. The project was based on ground breaking research by OTARC, which has proven to be seven times more accurate than the next best tool in the early identification of autism. OTARC  worked with a Salesforce team of engineers, designers and developers to create a smartphone app, ASDetect, that helps parents detect whether their children are on the autism spectrum. Since the app’s launch in Australia in February this year, the ASDetect app has had over 4,000 registered users with over 3,000 assessments performed to date. The collaboration has made  it possible for OTARC’s world leading research to be widely available and accessible around the world.

While scientists and academic leaders have welcomed the innovation agenda, there is the argument that there should be greater investment in both basic and applied research. Instead of relying on government to plug the gap, the private sector can get involved and jumpstart research, which is mutually beneficial.

Innovation: It’s make or break

Tomorrow’s budget will set the track for Australia’s shift to the knowledge economy. It’s been a long and important campaign for innovation, but most Australian’s haven’t grasped the urgency. Therefore, It’s imperative that the investment in skills, talent, and research matches the rhetoric from the government this year, and the technology industry continues to invest time, resources and funds into the programs and initiatives that will make a difference is crucial to Australia’s future.

It’s time for both the government and industry to put its money where its mouth is.