Most of that seems to have gone into the pocket of the proprietor, Tim Johnston, a salesman whose prodigious performance as a rip-off merchant could arguably qualify him as a sufferer of mental illness. But his grip on reality was not entirely tenuous. He was cunning enough to spend or promise to spend a slice of the cash on high-profile sports sponsorship to give Firepower a peak of credibility in the few years before its inevitable plunge into desolation. Queanbeyan's Matt Giteau moved to Perth to play for the Western Force, attracted by a record-breaking fee for an Australian footballer. Problem was, he never got paid the premium Firepower had promised. Ditto for the now defunct Sydney Kings basketball team and various boxers, bikers and V8 car racers.

Now, as the merde hits the media fan and corporate coppers poke along the paper trail, Johnston's excellent strategic business planning skills have come to the fore: the bugger seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

It's possible to think ''Good on him''. What a superlative hoaxer, parlaying a useless product into a personal fortune. What a colourful rogue, glad-handing the likes of Steve Waugh and Pervez Musharraf. What a bold risk manager, offering nothing of value but keeping ahead of comeuppance by pushing his brand into the public's face.

Easier, though, to see him as a low-life crook who deserves to languish longer in the clink than Bondy, especially when you hear sad stories from those who handed him their savings or mortgaged their houses to invest in his company.

But caveat emptor, baby, caveat emptor: let buyers beware. These buyers were sentient beings gullible and/or greedy but sentient nevertheless. In a free country you have the right and responsibility to blow your dough or invest it wisely. It's unlikely that the Firepower debacle is top of the mind for the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, as he prepares to receive a report of a review of our ''national innovation system''. Even less likely is that it has been a focus for the review panel headed by CSIRO board member Dr Terry Cutler which includes outgoing chief scientist Dr Jim Peacock.

But the Firepower story is the kind of tale they all want to hear more of: Australians investing millions of dollars in innovative products that have great potential in world markets.

The review, announced in January, is scheduled to report to Carr next week. Over the past six months those performing the review have done the usual things and exercised the usual jargon expected of an innovation review. They have received more than 600 submissions and agreed that their work should ''consolidate the findings of recent innovation system reviews and reports and summarise clear 'stakes in the ground' to avoid reinventing the wheel''.

They have appointed an advisory panel of four ''international experts'' on innovation, including the Margaret Thatcher Professor of Enterprise Studies at Cambridge and a professor of nuclear science from MIT.

They have held ''invitation-only round tables'' including sessions entitled Public Sector Innovation, Measuring Innovation in Canberra, Tropical Innovation in Townsville and Funding Models in Melbourne.

If they have ventured outside the square a tad, it is by featuring on their website a gallery of cartoons about innovation to provide ''novel and challenging insights''.

Their report, it is to be hoped, will do the same. But, apart from playing around with grants programs for product development or commercialisation and tweaking tax breaks for R&D, our governments have less power to direct innovation than they may pretend. The notion of a ''national innovation system'' is itself pretentious.