“Overcoming the productivity challenge — a fireside chat with Roy Green”

Emeritus Professor Roy Green AM FRSN
Special Innovation Advisor
University of Technology Sydney

Date and Time: Wednesday, 9 September 2026, 5.30–6.30 pm AEST
Venue: Zoom webinar
Registration: Please register in advance of the presentation
Entry: No charge
All are welcome

A joint presentation by Portal Global, the Spark Foundation, the Royal Society of NSW, and the University of Technology Sydney

Please click here to register

Summary: Productivity is the quiet force behind almost everything: the wages we can pay, the standard of living we can sustain, and the competitiveness of the institutions we lead, study and build.

Yet for the better part of two decades, productivity growth across the advanced world, Australia included, has slowed to a crawl. That slowdown helps explain stagnant wages, a widening gap between profits and household incomes, and the intensifying global contest for technological and critical-industry advantage.

History shows that periods of major technological change are usually turbulent, but until recently, they were also periods of surging productivity. The question now facing scholars and innovators alike is why that link has broken down, and what we do about it.

You are invited to join us for a fireside conversation with Emeritus Professor Roy Green AM, one of Australia’s foremost thinkers on innovation, industry policy and the economics of productivity.

Roy’s work has shaped national conversations on manufacturing, skills and management practice, grounded equally in rigorous evidence and real-world practice.

His new book (with Dr Phillip Toner), Understanding Productivity, takes on genuinely contested ground: how we define and measure productivity, the role of research and innovation, the effects of financialisation and business dynamism, the weight of management quality and workplace relations, and the risks and opportunities climate change presents. It draws on mainstream economics and on institutional and political economy alike, in the spirit of the open, evidence-based inquiry that unites both our communities.

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