Governments’ economic policies need to be based on a coherent view of the role of innovation and productivity in sustaining growth. This article analyses advice on fostering innovation from Australia’s main statutory economics adviser, the Productivity Commission. It argues that the Productivity Commission’s comprehensive 2007 report, Public Support for Science and Innovation, contributed to a policy vacuum hampering government support for innovation for nearly a decade. First, within the Productivity Commission’s understanding of innovation was a contradiction between its required policy targeting criteria and the impossibility of meeting these criteria. Second, the resulting stance on innovation policy was at odds with research and theory on the drivers of innovation and hence growth – particularly innovation systems theories and those based on evolutionary economics. The ensuing innovation policy vacuum suggests that the Productivity Commission placed the abstract ideological ‘purity’ of neoclassical economic theory above empirical exploration of how government can best support Australia’s future economic development. Since late 2015, moves to fill this policy vacuum have included a Senate inquiry, a government department restructure, and the creation of a new Innovation and Science statutory advisory board. Whether these initiatives foster sustained innovation will depend on the extent to which they adopt approaches based on innovation systems or evolutionary economics, and transcend the static neoclassical mindset espoused by the Productivity Commission.

Flexibility and reflexivity are essential processes for organisational innovation. The aim of the paper is to investigate their concurrent and interactive contribution in enhancing two innovation outcomes (the organisational openness towards innovation and the actual innovation adoption). Participants were 357 Italian employees. Results of a hierarchical regression model showed the role of both factors in fostering the two innovation outcomes under study. In addition, results showed the complementary interaction of reflexivity and flexibility, outlining two possible routes to innovation. Specifically, reflexivity appears to be a generative learning process capable of encouraging innovation in low-flexibility conditions, whereas flexibility tends to encourage innovation in low-reflexivity conditions. The findings provide empirical support of their roles as complementary resources for innovation, which has been under-examined in the literature.

In September 2010 and again in February 2011, the city of Christchurch was rocked by earthquakes of magnitude 7.1 and 6.3 respectively. The second earthquake was shallow and caused extensive damage and loss of life, destroying most of the Central Business District. This paper focuses on recovery management at the University of Canterbury, exploring the extent to which the senior management team learned lessons from the September event which informed the way that the recovery was managed after the February earthquake. It examines the counter-intuitive possibility that successfully dealing with a prior, lesser event, may not necessarily better equip managers to deal with a subsequent, more extreme event.