About the Forum

The Indo-Pacific Forum on Frontier & Breakthrough Innovation will bring together leading thinkers and practitioners from across the region to examine one of the most consequential challenges facing modern economies, namely, how to create the conditions in which genuinely breakthrough and potentially paradigm-shifting ideas can emerge, be recognised, financed and translated into economic and societal impact.

Hosted in Vietnam and anchored by strong connections between Vietnam and Australia, the Forum will use the Indo-Pacific's rapidly evolving innovation landscape as the foundation for a broader regional and international conversation. It will examine the institutions, incentives, capital, capabilities and networks that shape innovation, with particular attention to where existing systems may unintentionally favour incremental progress over more ambitious and transformative ideas.

A defining feature of the Forum will be the integration of frontier scholarship with the experience of people operating across the innovation ecosystem. Rigorous evidence and conceptual frameworks will be brought into direct conversation with the perspectives of entrepreneurs, investors, industry leaders and policymakers. This will allow participants to challenge established assumptions and examine how transformative ideas are generated, recognised, evaluated, financed, commercialised and scaled.

The Forum will seek to identify barriers and enabling conditions for breakthrough innovation and translate these insights into practical priorities for strengthening innovation systems across the Indo-Pacific. In doing so, it aims to generate new thinking that can contribute to policy development and decision-making at the highest regional levels, while strengthening the connections between research, finance, industry, entrepreneurship and government needed to turn the region's extraordinary talent and entrepreneurial ambition into transformative outcomes.