Aboriginal Bushfood and Intellectual Property

To share or not to share, that is the question?

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A prior phase of the project had captured anecdotal evidence in the form of stories from all participating FIAL members. These stories were used as the foundation point for all attendees to draw our own conclusions from them, based around our own experiences.

By diving further into the combined work of the group. prevailing attitudes and trends were identified within the afternoon session.

The result was a fascinated insight into the collective conscious and current attitudes to innovation that exist in the F&A sector. The need to gain commercial advantage as a sector by sharing best practice was balanced by the opposing fear of loss of individualised commercial competitive advantage.

The beauty of the approach adopted by FIAL lay within its ability to ensure that conclusions were shaped by the attitudes and experience in the room, not led by any bias present in the facilitators or process.

Aboriginal Bush Foods and cultural Law

One particular area of interest for Push Consult concerned current approaches toward the use of bush foods for nutraceutical purposes. Inextricably tied to this are the more important issues surround the respectful acknowledgement of Aboriginal cultural knowledge (Law).

What struck me most on the day was the differing attitudes and approaches to the sharing of innovation between western and indigenous business based on the differing value sets within each culture.

A new approach to culture & commerciality

Push have been jointly commissioned by both FIAL and NLE to create a model from which to develop a bush food incubator hub trial which embeds cultural security as a key principle.