For us, the task is urgent because ideas are all we have to sell and that would be true for any service organisation, but increasingly it will be true for all business.

In an age of parity products, where almost any service or product can be replicated in a matter of months, the speed with which we can get ideas to market will define all successful companies - whatever the business they're in.

And all of us have a responsibility to help business through this paradigm shift. The Australian dollar has been ruthlessly punished in recent times, and as far as anyone can pinpoint a cause, the problem seems to lie in the perception of Australia as an old economy. Australia has done well in attracting lots of high-tech multinational companies to use us as a regional headquarters, but this increasing number has not been sufficient to shift perceptions of us as an old economy.

Rather the problem seems to lie in our failure to spend enough on research and development, our failure to retain our best ideas in Australia, and our failure to adapt quickly enough to the nimble, ideas-driven culture that is the hallmark of new economy companies and countries.

There is a strong streak of anti-intellectualism imbedded in the Australian psyche that makes the transition harder for us than perhaps it needed to be, but get there we must if we are to thrive and prosper.

Fortunately, much good work has been done already in the public sector, and particularly in education, to prepare business for the task of managing the diversity needed to create new economy countries and companies.

As Chair of the TAFE Board in NSW, the world’s largest provider of vocational training and education, I'm proud of the progress we've made in incubating the principles of diversity within our Institutes, and driving that diversity to deliver new ideas, new jobs, and new industries.

Let me cite just one example.

This year, the New England Institute of TAFE, in partnership with the Toomelah Aboriginal Co-operative won the Prime Minister's Award for Business and Community Partnerships. Together we founded the Euraba Paper Company, which manufactures high-quality art paper from cotton waste.

Euraba began as a gleam in the eye of one TAFE teacher, who won a Churchill scholarship to study paper production among indigenous peoples in Central America. He returned to Boggabilla, and working with the Toomelah Aboriginal Co-operative, they established Euraba several years ago. There were nine foundation employees - all of them indigenous women and for all of them it was their first job since working as teenage domestic servants 20 or 30 years ago.

Euraba now employs 16 people and is growing from strength to strength. It's a wonderful success story for the environment, for jobs, for regional Australia, and for indigenous people, and most importantly, it's a tribute to the power of ideas.

TAFE is sharing its knowledge of diversity in action with training programs that equip managers with the skills to develop and implement their own diversity programs, and I know we have been a contributor to the formal process of Productive Diversity which is the focus of so much discussion at this conference.

Now I've talked a lot about ideas leaders thus far, but obviously not everyone from a different culture or background is an ideas genius, just as every middle class, middle manager is not necessarily totally bereft of ideas, but the notion of complementarity described by Cope and Kalantzis, is absolutely fundamental to the development of a currency of ideas.

If we want to give ourselves the greatest number of opportunities to capture new ideas then we need to be sure that we’re drawing on the knowledge and skills of our diverse workforce to capture new markets both in our immigrant communities and overseas.

If Australia is to become a truly globalized, new economy country, then we need the skills to operate in other languages and cultures. Our multicultural heritage is a strategic tool that gives us a significant edge over mono-cultural countries such as Japan or China. Our failure to exploit this strategic advantage is costing us money.

Now the good news for business, of course, is that it doesn't have to tackle this paradigm shift alone. Virtually all our major educational institutions have the capacity, and indeed, the earnest desire to share everything they've learned in both the practice and teaching of the principles of productive diversity with business.