The ability to successfully innovate on a sustained basis is critical in today�s �hyper-competitive� environment characterised by increasingly rapid technological change and shortening product life cycles, and where competitors quickly imitate sources of competitive advantage. At the same time, organisations find managing innovation difficult; both larger firms who fight to avoid being outplayed by smaller, more nimble competitors, and smaller firms struggling to compete against the resources and reach of larger, global competitors. This research develops an assessment instrument designed to assist organisations to improve their ability to innovate. An inductive, case-based methodology is adopted utilising action research techniques to develop the Innovation Capability Assessment instrument. The starting point of the research was an extensive analysis of the corporate entrepreneurship and innovation literature. The literature provided a basis for understanding what question areas might need to be included in such an instrument and led to the development of an initial theoretical framework and a preliminary assessment instrument. The preliminary assessment instrument was further developed and refined via five exploratory case studies. Three subsequent confirmatory case studies were used to validate the instrument�s effectiveness. The case studies were carried out at Australian organisations operating within a variety of industries and of varying sizes, all of whom were looking to improve their innovation performance. Data was collected through interviews with key members of each organisation and through assessment and action planning workshops involving participants from a cross-section of each organisation. The case studies led to additional assessment questions being added to the instrument, and the rationalisation of others. This research identifies the enablers of organisational innovation and finds that these are common to all the case organisations involved in the fieldwork. The innovation enablers form the basis of the Innovation Capability Assessment instrument that measures innovation performance against 21 questions within three key assessment areas: strategic management of innovation, the internal environment, and a series of innovation competencies. The relative importance of each innovation enabler to the organisation is also assessed. The Innovation Capability Assessment instrument is shown to be very relevant across a variety of organisation types and sizes. In addition, it is useful for an organisation to identify and prioritise weaknesses, and develop actions for improving their innovation capability.

This thesis examines Greater Melbourne’s indigenous plants movement from the 1930s to the early twenty first century. It demonstrates the important scientific and educational role of the public intellectual, Professor John Turner, and of the Melbourne University Botany School which he led for thirty five years. The case study of the movement within the City of Sandringham and its successor the City of Bayside reveals how the inhabitants of an urbanised are responded to threats to the indigenous trees and wildflowers of their neighbourhood, stimulating botanists to assist them and using political means in order to achieve their conservation objectives. The thesis draws upon a range of local archives, conservation literature and private papers.

This is the first academic examination of the place and history of works produced by Go-Set Publications in studies of contemporary Australian teenage culture. Go-Set (Go-Set Publications, Melbourne) is perhaps the single most significant musicbased newspaper in the history of Australian teenage popular culture. Go-Set reflected the teenage culture of the period 1966 to 1974, helping create a dynamic independently thriving Australian rock music scene from 1969. It was independently owned and operated, set its own agendas and defined its own place in Australian teenage society. Go-Set's history is given as a biography (following van Zuilen (1977) in distinct stages from birth till death, highlighting the important landmarks of its life. In particular Go-Set led culturally by developing the first National Top-40 song chart. It provided musicians and non-musicians with weekly updates on the nature of the Australia's teenage music-based societal culture. It led in the development of a teenage counter-culture by keeping readers informed about alternative thinking and ideologies through the views of pop/rock stars, and later, more editorially directly, through its radical sister publication Revolution. Go-Set survived because readers continued to support it. It both entertained and informed. It gave young Australians the necessary knowledge, instruction, and advice to keep them up-to-date in a changing social scene To explain why Go-Set was so important to its readers, this thesis postulates a series of six speculative models describing how readers might have used the newspaper. These models suggest a process of usage relevant to teenage socialisation, by defining the criteria for acceptance of Go-Set's content as sets of instructions, or codes, of particular social relevance, namely the codes of personal life, music, fashion, and alternative lifestyle. The models postulate some sociological and psychological reasons for reading Go-Set, and suggest why the magazine was so successful during a period when other, similar, magazines failed.

Despite considerable expansion in the scope and function of the state with respect to environmental protection, the world’s biological diversity and ecosystem services continue to deteriorate. Finding ways to better govern human-nature relations in cities is an important part of addressing this decline. The aim of this thesis is to explore the potential of social-ecological resilience to inform urban governance in theory and practice, through a focus on strategic spatial planning. Resilience has become an increasingly important urban policy discourse and much hope is placed in its potential to improve urban governance. However, there is an acknowledged gap between social-ecological resilience as an ideal and the ability to govern towards it in practice. At the time this doctoral research commenced there had been no engagement with social-ecological resilience in the planning theory literature and minimal engagement by empirical planning research. It is to this gap the thesis contributes. Social-ecological resilience scholarship is found to offer planning theory a partly new way of understanding complex human-nature relations. This is relevant to calls by planning theorists for more attention to matters of substance, including ecological processes. With respect to practice, planners see potential for social-ecological resilience to critically inform strategic spatial planning, including through the framing of problems, tools for analysis/synthesis and governance options. There are also however, lessons for social-ecological resilience scholarship that emerge from the detailed empirical research which suggests that attention to the politics of the everyday activities of administrators, elected officials, planning officials, conservationists and citizens operating within the so-called ‘mangle of practice’ is critical to explaining the gap between the ideal of governing for urban resilience, and what happens in practice. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 4: Manuscript. Paper 5: Manuscript.</p>

Out of the Shadows: The Mezzotints of Graeme Peebles investigates Victorian printmaker Graeme Peebles' engagement with the mezzotint medium since the early 1970s. Over fifty works from the artist's oeuvre of nearly 300 mezzotints are examined to demonstrate Peebles' high quality technical skills and his unique approach to subject matter. This has ranged from enigmatic, surrealist-inspired subject matter to landscapes of the Lake Eucumbene region in the Kosciusko National Park, which range from the ominous and foreboding to the romantic and sublime. In this thesis I explore the intellectual groundwork on which much of Peebles work is based. In doing so I am redressing the imbalance between the popularity of Peebles' work and the lack of critical writing about his art. While his work has been widely collected (see for instance the list of Public Collections that contain holdings of Peebles' work, on page 96), to date his work has not received the attention as deserved by a master of their chosen medium. In reviewing his work in such a manner I believe that Peebles deserves greater recognition in contemporary Australian Art. In conjunction with this thesis I have curated an exhibition bearing the same title, which was displayed at the QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, 12 March - 30 May 2004. It then toured to the Latrobe Regional Gallery, Warrnambool Art Gallery, Geelong Gallery, Gold Coast City Art Gallery and Perc Tucker Regional Gallery. A 16-page colour catalogue was also produced to accompany the exhibition.

Joanna Murray-Smith and Daniel Keene are both successful mid-career Melbourne playwrights. Taking them as a starting point and re-tracing an Australian theatrical lineage, this project explores new Melbourne narratives in which two branches of the Australian theatrical idiom converge in a single creative work, my play Friday Night, In Town. An analysis of the writing of Friday Night, In Town, authored by myself and presented for examination herein, demonstrates its narratives are structured with deliberate reference to Murray-Smith and Keene revealing a new form of contemporary urban playwriting. The play's originality, it will be shown, and its contribution to new knowledge, lie in its engagement with these playwrights and their Australian predecessors. These elements combine with a redeployment of the medieval pageant-play, which is thus reinvigorated as a mode of contemporary playwriting practice. The play text presented herein (Friday Night, In Town) represents 75 per cent of the weighting for this M.A. (by Research) with the exegetical component weighted at 25 per cent.

Melbourne is making a concerted bid to obtain the centenary 1996 Olympic Games. While much of its bid is occupied with explanations of the city’s ability to meet the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) requirements, it is underpinned by a common theme that the city possesses a unique quality of “Friendliness”. (For complete abstract open document)

Although this work was commissioned for the purpose of celebrating Alfred Hospital’s first one hundred years, I have made no effort to cover all of those years. I have set out: 1. To isolate the historical precedents for current hospital procedures and in particular to explore the relationship between Alfred Hospital and the State Government. This task was burdened by the scarcity of early hospital records and of research in related fields of charitable and social welfare - which emphasizes the value of rescuing the hospital’s fast vanishing past from oblivion. 2. By attention to human relationships (that constantly inconsistent element in all institutional affairs) to evoke those unique qualities which distinguish Alfred Hospital from other similar hospitals. 3. To convey what the Alfred meant to the greatest number of people associated with it. 4. To provide a useful source of reference.

This study engaged with the architecture of the ‘Initial Structure’ at Newman College, 1915-1918, so as to establish this building’s place in the oeuvre of Walter Burley Griffin (1876-1937). Griffin’s architecture at Newman College was unparalleled in Melbourne yet it has never been the subject of a comprehensive study. Further, a measure for Griffin’s creative method and architectural style has not been developed to date although much scholarship has been devoted to the identification of events and works in Griffin’s career. Furthermore a substantive analysis of the architecture of Walter Burley Griffin was lacking that defined and distinguished his work from that of the so-called ‘Prairie School’, and of Frank Lloyd Wright. / Walter Burley Griffin was the conceptual designer of Newman College, while Marion Mahony Griffin (1871-1961), his wife and architectural practice partner was its facilitator. An evaluation of Griffin’s university education, 1895-1899, drew out the compositional concepts of parti, types and architectonics, as his own preferred means of working. Griffin’s mature style in the college design was also indebted to his architectural practice and experiences in Chicago, 1899-1914. An initial assumption in this study was that Griffin was eclectic, as were the American predecessors he admired, Thomas Jefferson and Henry Hobson Richardson, as were Griffin’s contemporaries, Louis Henri Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Thus the sources of Griffin’s architectural ideas, elements, and methods of composition, have been traced in this study. / American campus designs were surveyed and comparisons made with the other three late 19th Century college buildings at the University of Melbourne to distinguish Griffins’ innovations in college planning, construction and form at Newman College. The description of the commissioning, committee-work and program for the Newman College building revealed the social and political idealism that linked Griffin with his supporters among Melbourne’s Roman Catholic community. Griffin worked with ‘structure’ in mind, both compositional and constructional. Particular partis, typologies and architectonic patterns have been 3 identified in the compositional structures of the college building design. Similarly Griffin’s adaptations of new and exploratory building techniques were investigated. / Griffin’s sources were not only American. He derived inspiration equally from seminal European and Asian precedents, which provided instances of an underlying compositional structure. In the architecture of Newman College the composite plans, mixed construction techniques and materials, and richly layered forms allowed Griffin scope to express ideal college purposes, spiritual universality, and organic wholeness.

This research explores the relationship between immigration experiences and psychological well-being within the Indian and Bangladeshi communities in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. The researcher conducted individual in-depth interviews with thirty-eight adult Australian permanent residents/citizens born in India and Bangladesh with the aim of examining personal post-migration accounts of adjustment, acculturation and coping in a foreign society and the effect on their mental health. Through qualitative analysis, the personal experiences and stories of South-Asian migrants and the psychological consequences of resettlement in Australia are explored. The study investigated coping strategies and psychosocial protective mechanisms and explored factors relevant to both successful and unsuccessful resettlement, and their relationship to psychological well-being. The results indicated that social and emotional disconnection, isolation and alienation, lack of recognition of professional skills, experiences of racism and discrimination, cultural incongruity, feelings of cultural uprooting and inadequate English language competency, all may contribute to psychological distress, difficulties in adjustment to life in Australia and in some cases, repatriation to the country of origin.