about

In the landscape of Australian innovation policy and industrial transformation, few figures have left as enduring a mark as Roy Green. Over more than three decades, he has moved seamlessly between rigorous academic inquiry and practical policy implementation, building bridges where others see only divides. His career tells the story of someone who understands that the future of economic prosperity lies not in choosing between knowledge and action, but in weaving them together.

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Today, as Emeritus Professor and Special Innovation Advisor at the University of Technology Sydney, Roy continues work that began decades ago in the halls of Cambridge and has taken him through universities across three continents, into the corridors of government power, and onto the boards of organisations shaping Australia's technological future. He chairs the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Hub in Brisbane, serves on the board of CSIRO alongside Australia's leading scientists, and helps guide SmartSat CRC as the nation reaches for space. Most recently, he has been entrusted with reviewing the Net Zero Economy Authority's Energy Industry Jobs Plan—a task that speaks to both his expertise and the trust government places in his judgment about Australia's economic future.

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FOUNDATIONS IN ECONOMICS AND PUBLIC POLICY

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Roy's intellectual foundations were laid at the University of Adelaide, where he completed a combined LLB-BA with First Class Honours and received the John F Kennedy Prize. But it was at the University of Cambridge where his thinking truly crystallised. As a Research Student at Trinity College and later a Research Fellow at Clare Hall, he earned his PhD in Economics during a formative period from 1976 to 1982. Cambridge was more than an education; it was an apprenticeship in thinking about complex economic systems, and it gave him the analytical tools he would later apply to some of Australia's most pressing industrial challenges.

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His early career took an unusual path. From 1982 to 1986, he served as Economic Policy Adviser to the UK Labour Party, working alongside figures such as Tony Blair and John Prescott during a period of fundamental rethinking of the role of government in economic development. This wasn't theoretical work; it was about confronting the reality of industrial decline and imagining new models of economic organisation. He also lectured part-time at the Civil Service College in London, training the administrators who would implement policy. These experiences taught him something essential: that elegant theory means nothing without the messy, difficult work of implementation.

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BUILDING AUSTRALIA'S INNOVATION ARCHITECTURE

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When Roy returned to Australia in the mid-1980s, he brought with him a conviction that the nation needed new thinking about innovation and industrial policy. He joined the Australian Government as Director of Policy Research from 1986 to 1988, then advanced to Senior Ministerial Adviser from 1988 to 1991. This was a chance to help build the institutional architecture that would support Australia's transition to a knowledge economy.

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Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Roy moved fluidly between academic leadership and practical policy work. At the University of Newcastle, he established and directed the Employment Studies Centre while serving as an Associate Professor of Management, and he published research that informed national debates on workplace transformation and industrial change. He served on the NSW Manufacturing Advisory Council, the Australian Centre for Best Practice, and numerous other bodies where research met reality.

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Roy's ambitions extended beyond Australia's shores. From 2002 to 2005, he took on the challenge of leading the J.E. Cairnes School of Business & Economics at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he also served as Vice-President for Research and founded the Centre for Innovation & Structural Change, now known as the Whitaker Institute. In Ireland, he chaired the Workplace of the Future initiative, served on multiple government research assessment panels, and helped establish the Atlantic Technology Corridor. He became Chair of the Irish Academy of Management, earning recognition as a Fellow—an honour that acknowledged not just his scholarly contributions but his ability to build institutions.

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LEADING BUSINESS EDUCATION
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Roy's academic leadership reached its apex through a series of deanships at Australia's leading business schools. From 2005 to 2008, he led the Macquarie Graduate School of Management in Sydney, before taking on his most transformative role: Dean of UTS Business School from 2008 to 2017. At UTS, he presided over a period of significant growth and innovation, strengthening the school's connections to industry and enhancing its reputation for research excellence. During this period, he also served as President of the Australian Business Deans Council from 2015 to 2016, giving him a platform to shape business education across the nation.

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But even while leading one of Australia's premier business faculties, Roy never abandoned his commitment to policy work. His talent was in seeing how these roles reinforced each other, how academic research could inform policy, and how policy challenges could drive new research agendas. He became known as someone who could translate complex economic theory into practical recommendations and who could bring real-world problems back into the classroom and research lab.

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CHAMPION OF ADVANCED MANUFACTURING

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If there is a single thread that runs through Roy's career, it is his unwavering belief in the importance of advanced manufacturing to Australia's economic future. At a time when many were writing off manufacturing as yesterday's industry, Roy saw something different: the potential for high-value, knowledge-intensive manufacturing to be a cornerstone of prosperity in a changing economy.

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From 2006 to 2011, he chaired the NSW Manufacturing Industries Council, helping to shape manufacturing policy for Australia's largest state economy. From 2008 to 2012, he led CSIRO's Manufacturing Sector Advisory Council, providing strategic guidance to the nation's premier research organisation on how to support industrial transformation. When the Australian Government established the Enterprise Connect Innovative Regions Centre in 2008, Roy was the natural choice to chair it, a role he held until 2013, during which he drove regional innovation initiatives across the country.

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Perhaps his most visible role came in 2011, when he was appointed to the Prime Minister's Manufacturing Taskforce. This was the highest level of government engagement with manufacturing strategy, and Roy brought to it not just expertise but a vision: that manufacturing wasn't about preserving old industries, but about creating new ones through innovation, automation, and integration with advanced technologies. He served on manufacturing advisory bodies for successive state governments, conducted independent reviews of struggling industries, including the textiles, clothing and footwear sector in 2008, and never stopped arguing for a sophisticated approach to industrial policy.

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In 2019, this work culminated in his appointment as Chair of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Hub in Brisbane. The ARM Hub represents everything Roy has worked toward: the integration of cutting-edge research with practical industry applications, the use of advanced technologies to transform traditional manufacturing, and the building of collaborative networks spanning universities, industry, and government. Under his leadership, the Hub has become a national focal point for robotics and automation adoption, helping Australian manufacturers compete in global markets through technological sophistication rather than low costs.

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GOVERNANCE AND STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP

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Roy's expertise in governance extends beyond manufacturing. From 2015 to 2018, he chaired the Queensland Competition Authority, overseeing economic regulation and competitive markets with the same rigour he brings to innovation policy. His appointment as Chair of the Port of Newcastle, first as Executive Chair in 2017-2018 and then as Chair from 2018 to 2025, demonstrated confidence in his ability to lead complex infrastructure organisations through periods of strategic transformation.

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In 2023, Roy was appointed to the CSIRO board, a position that places him at the table where Australia's research priorities are set and where decisions are made about how science serves the national interest. That same year, he joined the board of SmartSat CRC in Adelaide, bringing his understanding of innovation ecosystems to Australia's emerging space technology sector. He also chaired Food Innovation Australia Ltd from 2023 to 2024, applying his expertise in innovation to the food and agribusiness sectors.

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These appointments reflect a pattern: organisations facing complex transformation challenges turn to Roy because he understands not just technology or policy in isolation, but how to align multiple stakeholders around a shared vision of change. He sits on the University Council of Charles Sturt University, the Economics Advisory Council of the Committee for Sydney, and the Australian Design Council. Each position adds another thread to the network of relationships and influence he has built over decades.

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INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION AND INFLUENCE

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Throughout his career, Roy has maintained deep international connections that have enriched his Australian work. His collaboration with the OECD has been particularly extensive. From 1999 to 2002, he served on the expert group for the OECD's National Innovation Systems Program, examining how different countries organise their innovation ecosystems. From 2001 to 2004, he contributed to the OECD's horizontal innovation policy program, and from 2002 to 2005, he worked on the OECD's study of knowledge-intensive services activities. In 2012, he joined the expert group developing the OECD's Managerial & Entrepreneurial Talent Framework.

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His engagement with European institutions has been equally significant. He served on research panels for the European Commission's Framework Programme and worked with expert groups at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. From 2016 to 2018, he contributed to the UK Institute for Public Policy Research's Commission for Economic Justice—returning, in a sense, to the policy debates he had engaged with decades earlier as a young adviser to the Labour Party.

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These international experiences have given Roy a comparative perspective rare among Australian policy makers. He has seen how different nations approach innovation, manufacturing, and economic development. He understands what works in Nordic countries, the challenges faced by European industrial regions, and how smaller economies can punch above their weight through smart policy design. This global view informs everything he does in Australia, preventing insularity and bringing fresh ideas to local challenges.

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SHAPING THE ENERGY TRANSITION

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Roy's current work on the Net Zero Economy Authority's Energy Industry Jobs Plan may prove to be among his most consequential. As Australia grapples with the transformation required to achieve net-zero emissions, questions about jobs, skills, and industrial transition have moved to the centre of the national debate. The government has turned to Roy to conduct this review because it requires someone who understands not just energy policy or labour markets in isolation, but the complex interplay between technological change, industrial structure, workforce capabilities, and regional economies.

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This work draws on everything he has learned over three decades: his understanding of how industries transform, his experience supporting manufacturing transitions, his knowledge of innovation systems, and his practical wisdom about what makes policy succeed or fail. It is exactly the kind of challenge for which his unusual career has prepared him—where abstract principles must be grounded in regional realities, where economic theory meets political constraint, and where the stakes could not be higher.

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RECOGNITION AND HONOURS

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Roy's contributions have been recognised through appointment as a Member of the Order of Australia and through fellowships with some of the nation's most prestigious organisations. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales, a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development, and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce. He maintains his connection to Cambridge as a Lifetime Fellow of Clare Hall, and his Fellowship of the Irish Academy of Management acknowledges the mark he left during his years in Galway.

These honours matter not as mere titles but because they represent recognition by peers, other scholars, other policy makers, other institution builders who understand the difficulty of the work and the significance of the contribution. They acknowledge someone who has not just observed change but helped create it, who has not just written about innovation but built the institutions that enable it.

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A LIVING LEGACY

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What distinguishes Roy Green is the sustained coherence of a career dedicated to a set of linked ideas: that knowledge drives prosperity, that innovation requires institutional support, that manufacturing matters, that regions need tailored strategies, that government has a legitimate role in shaping industrial development, and that Australia can compete through sophistication rather than cheap inputs.

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He has pursued these ideas through academic research that has shaped how scholars and practitioners think about innovation systems. He has pursued them through government advisory work that has influenced policy at local, state, and national levels. He has pursued them through leadership of organisations, business schools, manufacturing councils, research centres, innovation hubs—where abstract ideas become concrete programs. And he has pursued them through individual relationships, mentoring younger scholars and practitioners, serving on countless panels and committees, and building the networks that allow good ideas to spread.

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The institutions he has helped build—the ARM Hub, the Innovative Regions Centre, the various manufacturing councils and innovation programs—continue to shape Australia's economic development long after his direct involvement. The scholars he has trained and mentored carry forward his approach to linking research with practice. The policies he has influenced continue to structure how the government supports innovation and industrial development.

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As Australia faces profound challenges—the energy transition, technological disruption, global supply chain restructuring, the rise of new manufacturing paradigms—Roy's work provides both practical tools and a larger vision. His career demonstrates that small nations can build sophisticated industries, that policy matters, that institutions can be designed to bridge research and application, and that manufacturing has a future if we are smart enough to imagine it.

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At an age when many academics have long since retreated to comfortable positions, Roy remains deeply engaged with the most pressing questions about Australia's economic future. He continues to chair the ARM Hub, guide CSIRO strategy, advise government on energy transition, and contribute to debates about innovation policy. His work is far from finished. The challenges ahead—decarbonization, automation, global competition—will require exactly the kind of integrated thinking he has spent a lifetime developing. Australia is fortunate to have him still in the arena, still building, still imagining what might be possible.

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