James Riley

For many, elite sport is the quintessential human endeavour. It drives ferocious competition, captures unconditional tribal loyalty, and rewards the victors with fame and fortune. As the Olympic motto declares, the limits of human performance are there to be tested – faster, higher, stronger. But what would happen if the boundaries were not just pushed, but abandoned altogether? That’s what PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel wants to do, putting some cash into lawyer Aron D’Souza’s concept of an “Enha…

Two signature election commitments that the Albanese government took to the 2022 election were its Buy Australian Plan and the creation of a Future Made in Australia Office. The aim of these initiatives was to better leverage government spending for industry development purposes. Specifically, the government was looking at procurement reform that would help to deliver stronger industrial capability. For Australia’s legion of SMEs that deliver digital and technology services, these commitments so…

“Energy transition is quite scary for many companies in mining,” says Climatech Groups chair Peter O’Connell, where the 4.9 per cent carbon reduction goal is daunting. “We’re currently in a 10 to 15-year transition period,” Mr O’Connell says and there is a daunting task ahead. Energy optimisation will be a key to meeting ambition reduction targets. Peter O’Connell is a notable figure in the telecommunications sector as founder of Amaysim and now the energy sector as chair of privately-held Clim…

Remember the optimism around the Open Banking revolution and Australia’s new digital data economy opportunity a few years back? It was enthusiastic but fleeting, having bubbled-up somewhere after the Turnbull government’s Ideas Boom and before the Morrison government’s Robodebt bust. It was all about leveraging the Consumer Data Right (CDR), a national government legislated policy and data standards framework for a secure online data sharing system that puts consumers’ data rights in the driving…

Do you own or manage a small business tech company in Australia? Do you sell products and services into the federal government? You have just days to make your submission to the InnovationAus.com SME Procurement Survey 2024. This ten-minute SME Procurement Survey provides a sentiment snapshot of the experience of local tech companies selling to government. The survey allows plenty of opportunities to leave comments in a completely anonymised way. So have your say: What has been your experience i…

With a world-class university system, pioneering medical researchers and growing tech manufacturing capabilities, Australia is well primed to become a Deep Tech powerhouse. But long-standing commercialisation short-comings are holding back the development of the industry, with many promising companies moving offshore for better access to funding and markets. But there are some deep tech pioneers leading the way in Australia though. Synchron founder and CTO Professor Nicholas Opie is definitely f…

Procurement reform remains a “huge opportunity” for the federal government to better harness the power of its $70 billion annual spending on goods and services to drive specific industry and economic outcomes, according to independent ACT senator David Pocock. The government should be looking at ways to bake a ‘retained economic benefit’ into its procurement guidelines and to use those tens of billions of procurement dollars to help in building sovereign Australian capabilities, he said. Senator…

James Riley is Editorial Director of InnovationAus.com, having joined the Hello Espresso Group after a 25 year career in journalism, government relations and marketing communications. James began his career as a reporter in trade publishing at a weekly industry newspaper called Computing Australia. He has written for a range of media outlets in Australia and Asia, including the South China Morning Post, PC Week, InformationWeek, ITNews, Business Spectator, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, BRW…

James Riley is Editorial Director of InnovationAus.com, having joined the Hello Espresso Group after a 25 year career in journalism, government relations and marketing communications. James began his career as a reporter in trade publishing at a weekly industry newspaper called Computing Australia. He has written for a range of media outlets in Australia and Asia, including the South China Morning Post, PC Week, InformationWeek, ITNews, Business Spectator, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, BRW…

There is surely no more challenging federal issue in need of urgent reform than tech procurement policy. It is the giant industry development policy lever sitting in plain sight, but which politics and cultural inertia have left virtually untouched for 20 years. It is the strangest dynamic, and one that stems from the treasonously bad Free Trade Agreement signed with the United Stated in 2004 and which came into the affect the following year. The FTA set in stone an existing cultural bias within the bureaucracy against buying local technology or using procurement budgets to building ICT capability. It deeply entrenched the idea in government that Australia is not a developer of technology, but rather derives economic benefit by being a sophisticated user of technology. This was a Howard era mantra that remains a cultural touchstone inside the Department of Finance.