Navigating through a universe of information

But now, with digital online media, there’s almost infinite scope for DIY (do-it-yourself) creative content produced by and for consumers and users, without the need for institutional filtering or control bureaucracies. The so-called “long tail” of self-made content is accessible to anyone near a computer terminal. Everyone is a potential publisher. Instead of needing to rely on the expertise of others, young people navigate themselves through this universe of information.

Although schools and universities certainly teach “ICT skills” and even “creative practice”, so far they have not proven to be adept at enabling demand-driven and distributed learning networks for imaginative rather than instrumental purposes.

Here is where creative innovation must be nurtured.

But it needn’t stop there. There are already loftier ambitions for scientific, intellectual and public uses of the Internet, but this time such initiatives can include everyone, not just expert elites, which is why “everyone” needs to be emancipated into digital citizenship.

Recently both business and public-service thinking have stressed the need for organisations, governments and communities to evolve models of innovation that go beyond the closed expert process of the industrial era. In a knowledge society, what’s needed is an open innovation network.

At the same time, the intuitive and imaginative skills of entrepreneurs have been compared with those of artists. The need for creativity in all aspects of economic and political life has been recognised. Creative talent now commands economic as well as symbolic value.

But an open innovation network - and therefore an internationally competitive Australian innovation system - would benefit from harnessing the creative energies of the whole population, not just those of isolated expert elites.

So here’s a question for the policymakers as we think about the next parliament: how might it be possible to extend across the entire population the opportunity to participate in and contribute to a national innovation system? How to make the entire country into an “open innovation network”?