But my suspicion, admittedly based on some rather indirect measurement, is that innovation is occurring. For example, according to a regular ABS survey on innovation in Australian companies, the trend over recent years is for more companies to be developing innovations and fewer to be abandoning attempted innovations (Graph 5).
We can also observe that growth in labour productivity per hour has picked up in the past couple of years, which suggests changes to practices in work places. And one crude gauge of “animal spirits” – the number of new companies registered with ASIC – has been rising quite strongly since 2011 (Graph 6).