The Salience Series
For years I have written about innovation in Australia — the need for research translation, the know-do gap, the stranded IP, the commercialisation failure. I have assumed that if we could fix the mechanism, the outcomes would follow.
But none of it really matters if no one cares.
This is a salience problem — and it underpins every challenge this country faces in science, innovation and research. If people fundamentally do not believe that innovation will improve their lives, then no amount of evidence, argument or policy design will move them. Truth placed in front of people who have decided it isn’t for them is not heard. It is ignored.
The Salience Series is an attempt to understand why that is — and what it would take to change it. Each article addresses one front of a war that academics and experts are losing — most without knowing they are in one.
The Salience War We Are Losing — The battle for attention: who controls what topics are discussed at all.
The Narrative War We Are Losing — The battle for framing: who controls how issues are defined once they are being discussed.
The Data War We Are Losing — The battle for evidence: who controls what data is available when the debate happens.
The Provenance War We Are Losing — The battle for the record of origin: whether the chain between what was created, who created it, and what was owed for it is ever honoured at all.
The next two articles turn from the fronts of the war to the ground it is fought on. Each takes a single true story the system has already lost — one national, one personal — and asks the same question from opposite ends.
Why Don’t We Know This? — The story we have forgotten. Duboisia, the D-Day medicine, the industry Australia built and let slip away — a chapter of our own history sealed behind a paywall, invisible to the search engines and readers who might carry it forward. Why don’t we know our own story?
Why Doesn’t Anybody Else Know This? — The story no one else can find. Thirty years of publicly relevant research, stranded behind walls and sector labels, while others rebuild it from scratch overseas. If the record is closed to the people who could use it, the knowledge is not lost — it is pointless. Why doesn’t anybody else know what Australia has already built?