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In episode nine of @AuManufacturing Conversations with Brent Balinski, we speak to Dr Jens Goennemann, Managing Director of the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre. 

Goennemann tells us about Australia’s slide downwards in the latest Economic Complexity Index rankings, compiled by Harvard’s Growth Lab, which were released a couple of weeks ago and based on 2020 trade data.

Economic complexity looks at the sophistication and diversity of a country’s exported goods, and requires a country to have built up a store of productive knowledge to rank highly.

An analogy sometimes used is the letters in a scrabble rack. A good diversity of tiles raises the possibility of creating higher-scoring words, but being lumped with a bunch of the same ones is limiting.

Australia’s scrabble rack looks pretty poorly according to the recent rankings. We're placed 91st, sitting between Kenya and Namibia, reflecting a dependence on digging and shipping raw materials without adding much value to them.

Goennemann tells us why Australia can’t coast on its resources forever, why manufacturing is the answer, and a few other things, such as his view on how balanced the level of support for fundamental versus applied research is in Australia’s innovation ecosystem.

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 Episode guide

1:40 – Professional and personal background.

2:42 – Our economic complexity and why it matters.

3:40 – High economic complexity countries and what we can learn from them.

4:50 – We need to understand what manufacturing is, and where the value is added within manufacturing.

6:20 – The structure of Australian manufacturing and the need to have stable, long-term policies to support it.

9:20 – A disagreement over research excellence at the Innovation Papers Live event.

11:42 – There are advocates for universities, but not many for those trying to commercialise university research.

14:30 – What are the opportunities to build scale in Australian manufacturing?

16 – Why we should view manufacturing as a capability rather than a sector

Relevant links

AMGC's website
www.amgc.org.au

Selected articles by Jens published at @AuManufacturing
https://www.aumanufacturing.com.au/from-one-economist-to-another-manufacturing-needs-to-be-understood-not-saved
https://www.aumanufacturing.com.au/look-west-for-how-to-build-on-luck
https://www.aumanufacturing.com.au/because-they-are-hard
https://www.aumanufacturing.com.au/the-game-changes-the-name-doesnt

Article from Harvard about the recent rankings, and drawing a link between countries lifting their complexity and higher predicted growth.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/harvard-growth-lab-projects-fastest-growing-economies-to-2030/

Australia's profile at Harvard's Atlas of Economic Complexity
(note both the low complexity ranking and predicted growth rankings.) 
https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/countries/14