A Vision for Australian Manufacturing
South East Business Networks, the City of Greater Dandenong’s longest running business development program, is an exceptional avenue for learning about issues to do with Manufacturing. This week they provided one ‘out of the box’ with an excellent presentation by Professor Goran Roos, a worldclass expert on Manufacturing and currently South Australia’s Thinker in Residence. With over 100 people in the room he explained some of the challenges Manufacturers face whilst simultaneously busting a few widely held myths about Australia’s approach to Manufacturing. There’s no doubt that the challenges for many are great and yet amongst them an idea emerged to me regarding Australia’s Manufacturing future. We have an opportunity to make the next decade ‘The Decade of Australian Manufacturing’
This is no Polly-Anna approach. It will require some serious work and more importantly it will require significant shifts in the way Government, Industry and the wider community think about Manufacturing and its role for Australia. All around Australia, and especially in the South East Melbourne area which is justifiably called Australia’s Manufacturng heartland, we have worldclass capability across all facets of ‘making’ – that is in essence what manufacturing means – ‘to make’. From biotechnology, clean room technology, nanotechnology, heavy steel fabrication and more, Australia has the core skills needed.
I sense though the future of manufacturing has a lot less to do with the skills and more about our understanding of how to best utilise those skills. A commitment to making the next ten years the Decade of Australian Manufacturing will see us position what we can do, how we think and what we can make at the fore front of world class manufacturing for many years to come. There is a clear opportunity if we are willing to see the future for what it could be, rather than focusing on what the future once was going to be. Things have changed and our Mannufacturing Future has changed whether we are willing to go there or not. The difference in our attitude will ultimately determine whether our future is more or less agreeable to us
Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber will be kicking off proceedings at the 2008 Regional Produce Summit in Wangaratta on the 20th of October where he’ll detail some of the emerging issues likely to impact upon the tourism and food sector in the foreseeable future and suggest ways that businesses in the sector might be able to…
Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber will both key note and act as Master of Ceremonies at the Lockhart Industrial symposium on the 9th of October, in Lockhart NSW. Marcus will discuss the clear business advantages that Eco Industrial parks provide to businesses, the way that symbiotic supply chains work to improve business resilience and the way…
Read More >Marcus Barber joined host Tim Cox and co-host, author and writer Andrew Peglar on the Conversation hour to muse about the types of futures one might expect to see in coming years. After Tim asked for clarification between a General, Theoretical and Strategic Futurist, Andrew kicked off with a question over the singularity. The…
Read More >Members of the Futures Foundation and the AFFA will be congregating in Pearl Beach in the coming weeks to consider the state of play in the Australian Futures community. Given the emerging challenges in Australia and around the world, the futures community requires just as much serious contemplation and forethought as does any one …
Read More >One of our many Nordic watchers, Are Thorsteinsson, has posted the Future Matters segment looking at the future of robotics, along with marking up full language captions in Danish. Although a couple of years old now, the early signs listed in this segment are only now coming into more mainstream focus Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber…
Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber has contributed a chapter to Volume Five of the ‘Death and Anti-Death’ Anthology which has just been published by Ria University. With contributors including Aubrey de Grey and Kevin Kelly and edited by Dr. Charles Tandy, Volume Five in the series is dedicated to the memory of Loren Eiseley, the renowned…
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Read More >With the theme ‘Moving Forward, Supply Chains of the Future’, Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber will open the Australian Supply Chain and Logistics Conference in Brisbane in July on behalf of the Supply Chain and Logistics Association of Australia. Details for the conference can be found below. The focus on the future of supply chains…
Read More >When it comes to quality strategic futures work as part of making the pragmatic decisions that shifts beyond theoretical futures work, I encourage my clients to question the assumptions they make about the information they have available to them. Which is why I am recommending the book ‘Gang Leader for a day – a rougue…
Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber was well and truly forced to justify the existence of his profession when venturing along to Jon Faine’s Conversation Hour last week. Co-hosted by Cath Pope the discussion looked at the role of Futurists, the Australia 2020 Futurists Summit and Jon’s scepticism around the role of futurists.. Along with Janoel Liddy,…
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