Age is about
wisdom, but for youth, it is fertility.
And, it is from the latter that a local group is hoping this
year to source the Goulburn Valley’s next “Big Idea”, from youthful minds,
teeming with innovative thoughts.
Shepparton’s Slap Tomorrow is working with the city’s
Lighthouse Project, several senior local secondary education people and
representatives of the City of Greater
Shepparton to set up “Big Ideas, 2016”.
Big Ideas 2016 is about encouraging young people to think
about and explore concepts that could successfully and safely take the Goulburn
Valley, and all the communities in it, safely deep into the 21st Century.
A Big Idea working group has agreed to further explore the
project in the hope of launching it early in the new school year to engage
students and teachers and encourage them to discuss what big idea they would
like to explore.
The student initiated Big Ideas would need to be unique, or
significantly different from what exists giving them legitimacy for the
Goulburn Valley urgently needs fresh ideas; ideas that break free sclerotic 20th
Century thinking; ideas that are environmentally, socially and economically
innovative and responsible.
Discussions about the Big Idea project have been energetic
and wide-ranging, but the essence of what is imagined blends beautifully with
the calls for ideas and innovation from Australia’s Prime Minister, Malcolm
Turnbull.
Those appeals from the PM will reverberate with hollowness
unless Mr Turnbull and his government can legislate equally innovatively to
ensure that any revolutionary thoughts from such concepts as Big Ideas 2016
don’t die in their embryotic state, but are energised by State support.
Success for most of the 20th Century’s great innovations and
companies, including Apple, can be traced to work done within government
research organizations.
Discussing the need for State involvement to apply the
innovation needed to address climate change, the author of “The Entrepreneurial
State” Mariana Mazzucato said: “…we are again in the need of an active State
that takes on the high uncertainty of its early stages, which the business
sector fears.”
Early discussions imagine the students, and their ideas,
would be guided by an acknowledged entrepreneurial mentor who could play a role
in ensuring the resultant big ideas actually implemented.
But more is needed for without demonstrable and vigorous
State support, most any idea, regardless of its ultimate societal value,
struggles to make it through what is known as the “valley of death” – that time
from infancy to commercial maturity.
The possibility of Shepparton being a centre of excellence
has frequently been discussed by some and now with Big Ideas 2016 as the focus,
maybe we can imagine a better way, blending what already exists to innovate our
way, driven by the fertile minds of our youth, to an even greater, Greater
Shepparton.
