As Australia’s resources boom fades, it’s clear that we need to seriously innovate to lift productivity and create new products and services for the digital age.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has set the scene with the recent Innovation and Science Agenda announcements.

But for Australia to become a nation that truly innovates…and reaps the economic and social benefits from those innovations…we need to learn how to genuinely collaborate with each other.

…working towards a common goal, working positively with each other, supporting each other’s ideas and contributions…

Does that sound like the Aussie way to you?

‘Going straight for the jugular’ is perhaps a more accurate description of the way support for new ideas and innovations are handled in our culture.

But for an ‘ideas boom’ to turn into real innovations and real inventions…to turn into jobs and prosperity for Australian communities…we need to foster a supportive culture where people with ideas and innovations are supported positively and treated kindly with constructive and productive assistance.

There is a reason why design-thinking methodologies encourage positive reinforcement of ideas rather than squashing contributions before they can be added together to form coherent and multi-faceted prototypes.

Working together on ideas and rapidly forming the teams necessary to produce innovative products and services – this is the new competitiveness of nations.  We need to enable collective intelligence to operate by default rather than it being the exception.

Recent reports have highlighted that we seem to have enormous research capability but very poor ability to commercialise.  There is lots of talk about the availability of risk capital and the need for more incubators.  These are vitally important – but it’s more basic than that.  The most powerful force of support is finding people that believe in you.

People are fragile.  If we heap negative criticism on each other then the systems effect is clear – we will restrict the flow of ideas and the number of people willing to brave the innovation and entrepreneurial journey.