Associate Professor Jason Potts, Senior Research Fellow

TEXT ON SCREEN: RMIT logo on white background with video title: Associate Professor Jason Potts, Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow, School of Economics, Finance and Marketing.

AUDIO: Ambient music playing

VISUAL: Jason Potts is sitting in his office surrounded by books and an award certificate.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JASON POTTS SPEAKS: I really love Melbourne as a city. It's a fantastic place to work, fantastic place to live.

VISUAL: Cuts to a busy scene on Swanston Street Melbourne. Trams passing, people moving then a still of the new Swanston Academic Building, with RMIT logo in its portal.

VISUAL: Return to Jason Potts in his office.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JASON POTTS SPEAKS: 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.

VISUAL: Cut to an RMIT red brick building facade with blue sky background.

ASSOCIATE PROFESOR JASON POTTS SPEAKS: So it was a five year full time research position that became available, which means that you can take on much bigger projects.

VISUAL: Return to Jason Potts in his office.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JASON POTTS SPEAKS: 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.

VISUAL: Cuts to a city scape of Melbourne’s skyline, then a time-lapsed view of Bowen Street on the RMIT main campus where people are moving around quickly

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JASON POTTS SPEAKS: The theory that we have is that all industries start off with this phenomena of essentially amateur user collaboration to develop technology

VISUAL: Return to Jason Potts sitting in his office.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JASON POTTS SPEAKS: 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.

VISUAL: Elevated view of tree-lined Swanston Street and RMIT’s buidings.

VISUAL: Jason Potts sittting at a computer looking at the screen and typing on the keyboard.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JASON POTTS SPEAKS: 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…

VISUAL: Return to Jason Potts sitting at his desk.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JASON POTTS SPEAKS: 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.

VISUAL: Jason Potts and another man standing together. Jason Potts is holding and touching a tablet device, then we cut to them talking to each other earnestly.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JASON POTTS SPEAKS: 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.

VISUAL: Return to Jason Potts sitting at his desk.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JASON POTTS SPEAKS: 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.

VISUAL: Jason Potts and another man sit at a desk in the Swanston Academic Building talking with pens over paper.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JASON POTTS SPEAKS: 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.

VISUAL: Return to Jason Potts sitting at his desk.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JASON POTTS SPEAKS: 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.

VISUAL: View of RMIT University logo sign on another building through a window onto Swanston Street, then cut to Jason Potts walking down Swanston Street in front of the Swanston Academic Building main entrance.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JASON POTTS SPEAKS: 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.

VISUAL: Return to Jason Potts sitting at his desk.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JASON POTTS SPEAKS: 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.

VISUAL: Facade of an RMIT Building with RMIT logo sign and grey sky background, then a slow-paced Bowen Street scene of Jason Potts strolling along the path with briefcase in hand.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JASON POTTS SPEAKS: 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.

VISUAL: FADE TO WHITE

TEXT ON SCREEN: Find out more at www.rmit.edu.au/research/research-fellowship-schemes

AUDIO: Ambient music fades.

VISUAL: RMIT University logo

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