How to have a debate about innovation that actually means something

Is it possible to have a debate about innovation policy that doesn’t sound like an experiment in linguistics gone horribly wrong?

Buzzfeed’s coverage of the Turnbull government’s innovation announcement was pretty spot on: The Government’s Innovation Launch Was Packed With Incredible Marketing Bullshit. Labor MP Ed Husic’s piece in reaction to the package began with a similar bluntness: “Get ready for the buzzword bombardment.”

It’s easy to be sceptical about a lot of the discourse around innovation: its garbled vocabulary of buzzwords, its slavish devotion to the concept of the ‘entrepeneur’, its penchant for libertarianism, its willingness to butcher the word ‘imagination’, Shingy.

But with both parties now putting forward serious proposals to drive innovation it is worth appreciating that we are at least having a bipartisan focus on the future of the Australian economy. We’ve at last decided that properly funding the CSIRO is a good thing. We’re finally talking about Australia’s comparatively low rate of collaboration between universities and the private sector.

This is a very good thing. Away from the buzzwords, innovation should be a key component of Australia’s economic future. Across industries, greater innovation offers a way to compete in a global market that maintains the high wages and high living standards that we should expect.

But innovation policy does not exist in a politically neutral vacuum. As our debate around innovation becomes more sophisticated we have to ask who will benefit from these reforms, because there are very different ways to drive innovation and those decisions have social outcomes.

Already we are seeing a split between the two major parties. A great deal of the Liberal’s plan is pitched at venture capitalists, and the ability to write off startups as a tax concession is a clear pitch their backers in the business community.

The Labor plan has emphasised education and access, most notably in its idea to use HECS-style loans to help graduates start small businesses. Many in Labor have lamented having to share the Coalition’s newfound interest in the tech sector, they need to be articulating these differences.

An extravagant focus on the power of capital in driving innovation risks creating an economic system that excludes people from wealth. There may be political energy in recreating the success of Silicon Valley — but Australian voters are wary of the socially destructive outcomes of American-style capitalism.

The Labor Party, and social democratic parties more broadly, need to articulate a policy platform around innovation that supports our belief in social justice. We have to use our society’s capacity for science and technology to benefit everyone, rather than endlessly pleasing a cadre of venture capitalists.

To that end, one of the most interesting figures in the debate about innovation is the Italian economist Mariana Mazzucato. Her TED talk expounding the unsung role of public sector institutions in driving investment should be watched by anyone looking for a substantial discussion of what innovation actually looks like.

Last year her book, the Entrepeneurial State, beat Thomas Picketty’s celebrated ‘Capital in the 21st Century’ to win the New Statesman’s inaugural SPERI prize for political economy. She then compared her findings with Picketty’s works in a fascinating lecture about the relationship between innovation and inequality. It’s well worth watching.

Mazzucato offers a way of talking about innovation that doesn’t pander to the venture capitalist crowd, and that instead speaks to the best traditions of social democracy. It is a way of reclaiming innovation from the self-appointed ‘disruptors’ and returning it to the public who actually funds it.

The ALP, as a social democratic party of a broadly social democratic nation, has to build an economic future that benefits all Australians. Instead of talking about creating apps, we need to be talking about creating entire industries that can deliver good jobs to millions of Australians. And we need to be committed to including the poorest and most vulnerable in our success.

We can have a meaningful debate about innovation if we talk about values and the kind of society we want to create. The buzzwords and the marketing bullshit won’t stand up to it.