One of the most entertaining, imaginative and rigorous thinkers on economics, innovation and government policy, Dr. Nicholas Gruen is a crowd favourite, having presented his keynote on five different continents to sizeable crowds.

A current investor in numerous Australian start-ups, he provides an interesting insight into today’s economic outlook and brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the events he presents at.

“A brilliant man.

He’s not somebody you come across that easily, but once you do, you become addicted.

He is, I think, extraordinarily original and imaginative and thought-provoking.”

Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Correspondent, Financial Times, London

“Nicholas Gruen never fails to intrigue, amuse and, most importantly, to make us think. Truly well informed and with a strong sense of history, Nicholas is one of Australia’s best ideas-people with a gift for making thinking exciting. I never get tired of listening to him weave his words into grand tapestries, well supported with contemporary experience that delivers many an ‘aha’ Moment.”

Pru Goward, Former NSW Minister for Family and Community Services and Minister for Women.

 

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Nicholas Gruen is a policy economist, entrepreneur and commentator on our economy and society and a frequent interview guest on Australian media and international podcasts.

He is CEO of Lateral Economics, Visiting Professor at Kings College London Policy Institute and Adjunct Professor at UTS Business School.

He is Patron of the Australian Digital Alliance, comprising Australia’s libraries, universities, and digital infrastructure providers such as Google and Yahoo.

Past 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 was the founding chair of Kaggle, which was sold to Google and 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.

He has advised Cabinet Ministers & 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.

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.

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).

 

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Nicholas Gruen: 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.

 

 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.

 

How we’re wanting ‘change we can believe in’ before change we need 

The young want ‘change’ – as well they might. But not all change is worth having. And change-makers use the tools of marketing to convince us of the value of their causes. In this talk, Nicholas Gruen will interrogate change-making and conclude that some of the causes we’re invited to get caught up in are unlikely to achieve much and might even make things worse. Meanwhile, other changes we need to make are as urgent as ever.

 

Want your business to be smart? Maybe try not being stupid.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner and co-billionaire, says that’s all they do. “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” There are hundreds of cognitive biases, many of which get stronger in groups, particularly hierarchical groups. That’s pretty much every organisation.

What are these biases and how can you and your business protect yourselves?

 

Why aren’t business decisions more evidence-based and what can we do to make them so?

Evidence-based policy is a big deal in government. It is important in business too, but business tends to ‘wing it’, paying little attention to the way KPIs are set. Business needs far deeper expertise in monitoring and evaluation, delivered, as it was in the Toyota production system, to help those at the ‘coalface’ optimise their performance. In this talk, Dr Gruen will show how you can revolutionise the performance of your business by using expertise first developed in the not-for-profit sector to measure and track the effectiveness of value creation in the business and report it independently to all stakeholders.

 

How we blew it in international negotiations: DFAT goes AWOL on IP and the TPP

It’s axiomatic that as we transition towards a progressively more knowledge-intensive economy, intellectual property (IP) arrangements become increasingly important. Yet they have never received the attention they deserve from economists or policymakers. IP arrangements are increasingly constrained by international agreements, and yet our chief negotiator, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, demonstrates virtually no coherent thought as to what our strategic IP interests are or what kind of framework might be applied when considering and negotiating them. In this presentation, Dr Gruen explores the basic economics of IP and suggests some principles to which we should adhere in negotiating international agreements; principles we’ve ignored so far.

 

Why have our democracy and our politics turned so toxic and what can we do about it? (Alternative title for talk below).

Detoxing our democracy: a new role for ordinary people in politics 

Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump have humiliated political elites. But Australia led the pack in 2013 when Australia’s Parliament humiliated themselves – abolishing carbon pricing when most of them understood the folly of doing so. Why? Because of the imperatives of political combat in our vox pop democracy. With the political-infotainment complex degrading representative politics, creating space for ordinary people to influence our politics at every level could see our democracy reborn. It could also help young Australians, less educated and lower income Australians fight back against political eclipse by older generations.

 

Detoxing democracy: Brexit and the considered will of the British people

Though material conditions played their part, the degradation of politics now so evident in the shock and awe of Brexit and Trump also reflect the way in which elections orient politics around political combat, rather than deliberation and problem-solving. Yet Britain could use the ancient Athenian idea of selection by lot – choosing a cross-section of the public to deliberate together to complement elections – to turn its slow-motion crisis into the rebirth of democracy, moving it from government according to the will of the people, and towards the richer, safer notion of government according to the considered will of the people.

 

How to protect your organisation from our toxic politics

Polarisation is built into politics. You can’t become a politician without beating other politicians to the job. Political activists feed off all the same things a shock jock feeds off – sensation, indignance, self-righteousness. In this presentation, Dr Gruen shows how self-appointed spokespeople – for consumers, for business, for investors, for women, for any group, are usually hugely unrepresentative of the group they claim to be representing and explores ways your organisation can cut through to deal with the people themselves.

 

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Any of the following topics can be elaborated on request.

• How public-private data partnerships could transform our world

 

• How can we get leaders who serve, rather than look after themselves?

 

• Corporate social responsibility, shared value, ethics and your organisation

 

• Innovation – in government, business, health, education and finance

 

• Big Data: myths and reality

 

• Is Artificial Intelligence coming after your job?

 

• Everything you really do know about economics that doesn’t involve numbers or forecasts

 

• We’ve heard what governments should learn from business: What can business learn from governments?

 

• Design thinking: how it can help business, government – all organisations in everything they do

 

• Social innovation: what it is, how you can help it and how it can help you

 

 

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