How to climb high technology.(The Australian Miracle: An Innovative Nation Revisited)(Book review)

The Australian Miracle: An Innovative Nation Revisited, by Thomas Barlow; Pan Macmillan, 2006, $25.

THE PRINCIPAL VALUE of this book becomes apparent on the first page of the preface, where the following anecdote is related. The Executive Director of the Federation of Scientific and Technological Societies, the umbrella body for Australian science and technology, told Barlow, "As far as anyone can remember, you are the first person employed as a science policy adviser who actually has a science background."

Indeed, Barlow has a science and technology background in spades: a distinguished undergraduate record at the University of Sydney, doctorate at Oxford, research fellowship at MIT in Boston, science journalism, policy adviser to the Minister for Education, Science and Training and now the CEO of a high-tech company. He actually knows what he is talking about and is therefore very much worth hearing. He is also very sensitive to the dangers of group-think and likes to present himself as something of an iconoclast, a "myth buster".

Much of this book amounts to a thesis about the nature of Australian society, economy and history as they impinge on technological innovation and our future prospects in technology. Barlow is appalled at what he perceives as a national inferiority complex and urges us to feel good about ourselves and to recognise both our past achievements and future opportunities.

Barlow is an Australian technological optimist, mainly because of two central developments. First, our traditional low-tech sectors (principally mining and agriculture) are going high-tech and therefore becoming more productive. Second, the "open innovation model", where small firms can participate globally, favours Australia because it overcomes our basic handicaps of small internal markets and the tyranny of distance. He also believes that the flexible, non-hierarchical Australian ethos is more comfortable in the open-innovation model.

It would be unrealistic to expect a work of 260 small-format pages to ...