Innovation is a central element to maintaining and enhancing profitability and international competitiveness. The Australian sugar industry has an excellent record of innovation with improved varieties, irrigation and milling technology to name a few. Despite these improvements in technical efficiency, the rate of increase in productivity has slowed in recent times and Australia now faces increased competition in the international raw sugar market.

The Sugar Research and Development Corporation (SRDC) funded an initiative by the CSIRO and the Cooperative Research Centre for Sustainable Sugar Production (CRC Sugar) to improve profitability through modification of existing harvest management practices. The two critical success factors for realizing these gains were acceptance of change and the development of reliable tools for options analysis that captured the complexity of the sugar industry system.

This represented a paradigm shift towards a whole of industry systems approach with concurrent social and technical (socio-technical) initiatives. The technical work was undertaken by CSIRO/CRC Sugar and involved integration and optimisation of on-farm growing and harvesting components and the off-farm transport and milling components. The concurrent change management activities were aimed at developing novel implementation pathways which took account of the socio-economic aspects of the system. The change management strategy was facilitated by Bill Andrew (Director, AECorganisational consulting).

The case study approach adopted for the project was based on the Mackay district and concluded recently. Analysis to date has shown there are substantial gains in productivity and planning is now underway to extend the implementation to other districts throughout the industry. The SRDC Executive Director, Dr Russell Muchow said the project was potentially of immense economic and social value to the sugar industry with estimates of increased sugar revenue from the Mackay district in the order of $10-13 million per annum. The SRDC Program Review Panel stated "the success of the project should be widely promoted by industry collaborators as well as by project staff, with particular emphasis on the use of participatory processes that ensured success".