The report on the review of the national inovation system has been released!

There’s a lot to go through, so we’ll get to the detail over the coming days but, for now, the Minister for Innovation, Kim Carr’s overview gives an indication as to the outcome: -

“The Review provides an honest appraisal of Australia’s innovation effort and concludes that while our global competitors have been increasing their innovation efforts, our performance has been falling.

“If we are serious about unlocking Australia’s innovation potential, we all have to lift our game,” Senator Carr said.

The panel’s recommendations range across a number of key themes including innovation in business, strengthening people and skills, excellence in national research, information and market design, and taxation.

“We have every reason to be optimistic about our future – but to fulfil our potential we must embrace innovation,” Senator Carr said.

All the documents will be read and disected over the coming days - so stay tuned for a lot more info on this one.

iKnow - A new Tokyo-based online learning site, built by parent company Cerego, has launched at the DEMO conference today.

in their words:

Combining cognitive science with the social and collaborative structure of the web, Cerego empowers people to learn faster, remember longer, and manage their knowledge.

At the moment, the site has been successful in just focusing on teaching Japanese speakers English and vice versa, but with plans to open the technology up to all types of learning, and to release an API, you can bet this will change soon.

I haven’t had a long enough play with it to see how it adapts to my learning style (one of the promises), but the UI is definitely easy to use and much more Web 2.0 friendly than most other learning sites I’ve seen.

Which is where the Australian connection comes in.

Creative Director at parent company, Cerego, is none other than Aussie web industry veteran, Simon Dennett.

Great to see another Aussie flying the flag overseas.

Congrats Simon, to you and your team.