Today I had the pleasure of meeting with Grant Kearney. Many of you will be familiar with Grant as the founder of The InnovationXchange (IXC).
Others may know him from further back with The Cancer Council and UNSW.
Now Grant is starting a new endeavour - Connected Knowledge and recently he spent 10 days in Mauritius discussing their strategy for innovation, policy and program development into the future.
Mauritius is an interesting country, with a history built on sugar plantations that has more recently diversified into sophisticated tourism and also textiles, clothing and financial services.
More recently they have also been developing expertise in marine and bio-agricultural capabilities.
What is interesting is that Mauritius is quite an important country as the east board gateway to South Africa with a multilingual population speaking French, English and Creole. So in that way they are not dissimilar to Singapore as an entry to South East Asia or Hong Kong to China.
Though Mauritius is still very much a developing country.
They do however have a stable democratic legal system with no military forces.
As Mauritius develop their infrastructure, one of the key problems they have is their capacity to absorb and develop new ideas. There are too many consultants that come in - then don't finish the job.
Business incubators start - then don't happen.
And it is too expensive to have permanent experts - so they are in a double bind.
So Grant has been discussing the concept of an Open Knowledge Economy with their leaders. An economy whereby Mauritius develops knowledge openly with other nations and shares it with their population - openly.
Grant is now looking for a team of about half a dozen smart good minded and kind hearted people to work together as an International Innovation Mentors Panel.
They will give time twice a year to visit Mauritius and help them develop their Open Knowledge Economy.
These thoughts have been well received in Mauritius and they expect support for contributors with travel and accommodation will be available.
In this way, Mauritius can build on the skills they have got openly - rather than trying to compete with other countries through building another incubator or similar.
You can learn a lot about innovation, collaboration and knowledge sharing by downloading the speech Grant presented at Mauritius here.
To discuss engaging Grant's skills and knowledge in the field of innovation and policy development as well as mentoring and coaching of leaders on how to commercialise creative skills, you can contact Grant here
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