Associate Professor Jason Potts, vice - Chancellor's senior research fellow - Rmit university

I really love Melbourne as a city. It's a fantastic place to work, fantastic place to live. When I first found out about the fellowship it was incredibly exciting. These things have a relatively low probability of being awarded. And the main benefit of it is that you get work full time. So it was a five year full time research position that became available, which means that you can take on much bigger projects. So why do I do what I do here? I'm an innovation economist and I'm really concerned with the question of just where new ideas come from because I think this is the single most important part of economics. It's the story of where growth comes from, where new technologies come from. The theory that we have is that all industries start off with this phenomena of essentially amateur user collaboration to develop technology so rather than technology starting off initially in research laboratories we think they actually start off much closer to the user end of the spectrum. So if we think back to the early stages of personal computers, again this was something that emerged out of garages, hobbyists and hackers in the 1970s, the things like the homebrew computer club was a club, it was a group of mostly young enthusiasts who got together to compete with each other in terms of who could do the most interesting things with this new technology. Early phases of the personal computer industry no one saw it as a personal computer industry. It wasn't an industry at all it was just some interesting hardware combined with some interesting software that a bunch of people were trying to see what they could do with it. And out of that early knowledge commons we got the PC industry. We think much the same things are happening at the moment with 3D printing. We're calling it the innovation commons. And we haven't really had the theoretical framework to understand it as a commons before. So this is why we are trying to reconstruct this, trying to develop theory of this , wanting to go back and look at previous industries and understand the extent to which their own very early phase development may have followed this amateur hobbyist hacker enthusiast line. Of groups of people getting together to share and pool technology and in the process sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately developing new applications that then become the foundations of new industries. When I first moved to Melbourne I sought out a position at RMIT deliberately. And the reason for that was that I wanted to work with some specific colleagues that we have here. But what is unique and interesting about the school that we have here is it's actually seeking to develop what you might call a uniquely Australian school of economics. I get to be part of creating a research culture here which is something that was never really possible for me at the previous universities I was involved with. So it's a very exciting opportunity to be part of.