Nicholas Gruen
PROFILE
Described by Chief Economics Correspondent of the FT Martin Wolf as “the most brilliant economist you’ve never heard of”, Nicholas Gruen is a policy economist and entrepreneur and frequent commentator on Australian media and international podcasts.
He is CEO of Lateral Economics, Visiting Professor at Kings College London and Adjunct Professor at UTS Business School. In the 1980s he was a school teacher and a cartoonist.
He is Patron of the Australian Digital Alliance, comprising Australia’s libraries, universities, and digital infrastructure providers such as Google and Yahoo.
He was the first chair of Kaggle — now part of Google — and is an international start up investor. He was also founding chair of HealthKit (now Halaxy) and is former chair of global aged care software provider Health Metrics.
In 2009 he chaired the Australian Government’s internationally acclaimed Government 2.0 Taskforce on how governments can best respond to the advent of the internet and social media.
Other previous positions include:
- Chairman of the Open Knowledge Foundation (Australia) (2015-2020),
- Council Member of the National Library of Australia (2013-16),
- Chairman of the Federal Government’s Innovation Australia (2013-14) (Member from 2011)
- Chairman of The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI) (2010-16).
He has advised Cabinet Ministers, sat on Australia’s Productivity Commission and founded Lateral Economics and Peach Financial in 2000. He’s had regular columns in the Courier Mail, the Australian Financial Review, the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald and has published numerous essays on political, economic and cultural matters.
He was on the Cutler Review into Australia’s Innovation System in 2008, and the review of Pharmaceutical patent extensions in 2013.
He has a BA (Hons – First Class) in History (1981) a Graduate Diploma in economics and a PhD from the ANU (1998), and an LLB (Hons) from the University of Melbourne (1982).
SPEAKING TOPICS
How the internet is changing our economy and our lives
While we’ve been reforming our economy in the image of a normal market, something huge has happened. A whole slew of new public goods has been built. And most have been built privately. Google, Facebook and Twitter are all public goods. So too are open source software and Wikipedia. The first group are built for profit, the second for other reasons. But the government had nothing to do with either. This calls for a whole new agenda – in which those in the public, private and NGO sectors come together and build the digital public goods of the 21st century. What do those new goods look like? And how do we start?
Five ways innovation talk is too vague to help anyone: And how the extended technology stack can really promote innovation
Innovation policy costs the Australian budget well over $1 billion or closer to $10 billion a year if you include research budgets. Little of it is evidence-based and we have little idea of how effective it is. We subsidise activities that we think are underprovided by the market. But if we focused instead on the extended technology stack – the way in which different organisations, from governments to community groups to individual businesses could all dovetail their activities better together online – together cooperating in the development of a platform, we could make Australia an innovation powerhouse at zero cost to the budget.
Why your values statement isn't worth the airbrush you wrote it with
Workplaces struggle with values statements on strategy retreats, only to find business-as-usual resume on cue the next Monday morning. That’s because they land on pleasing sounding words and that sets us up for wishful thinking. Values are only ever defined when we have to trade them off against each other.
And that gives us the clue to understanding the values of an organisation and how to think about them.
Nudging towards innovation
Dr Gruen will discuss the myriad ways governments can promote innovation without spending money. This is the “Innovation without money” agenda he championed as Chair of Innovation Australia. Because more and more successful innovation involves collaboration between different actors in the economy, it stands to reason that there are strict limits to the extent to which traditional subsidies to activity – whether that activity is in government, the private sector or in some other sector such as education or the not-for-profit sector – can generate innovation.
Are the forecasts on which you rely worth the paper they're written on?
When researchers at the Reserve Bank of Australia investigated the amount of value their forecasts added, the answers were not pretty. The RBA spends more than anyone else on forecasts and has the best experts. And their forecasts were probably the best there are over a long period of time. But they still explained only around 10 percent of the changes they forecast, with the rest being random noise. And other forecasters were nearly as good – or should that be “only slightly worse”. Yet forecasters are notoriously overconfident in their forecasts. How can we do better in forecasting? How can we prevent overconfidence in our forecasts? We can learn by asking which forecasters almost never suffer from overconfidence. And why.
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