Innovation statement 'will make vital difference to start-up sector'

The Australian start-up community believes the innovation statement will make a vital difference to their sector, with the new measures giving incentives to kick-start businesses.

Source: SBS

The government wants to create an "Innovation Culture" - but the philosophy is already booming among start-up entrepreneurs like Andrew Low.

He co-founded his company Ordermentum last year and is set double the business and employees before Christmas.

"You can't underestimate the messages that a government brings to supporting the start-up community. A message of supporting innovation, a message of creativity is huge to the ecosystem, it brings attention, it brings credibility and it bring investors,"  he said.

Andrew is just one of the fintech start-ups based at the Sydney innovation hub Stone and Chalk. 

Its CEO, Alex Scandurra thinks that the government's Innovation Statement is an important signal to business and should have large implications across a number of different things.

"Importantly from a policy perspective, key things like tax incentives to encourage more people to invest, especially people with high net worth.  It would be great to get those people to look at investing in early stage start-ups as opposed to what has traditionally happened in Australia which is property, property, property," he said.

He believes that it will also propel the sector forward by creating a positive image around start-ups.

"Hopefully what is going to happen through this innovation package is that it will encourage a lot more people who are thinking about it and not quite ready to do it to get into the space.  Likewise for investors who would have previously seen this area as too scary with a lot of uncertainly, hopefully the package will help to de-risk that for a lot of people."

The start-up community hopes that the link between R&D and business will be strengthened as collaboration grows between researchers and industry.

Petra Andren is the Director of Strategy & Business Development at the award winning ATP Innovation Hub.

"We know that we have world class research, we know that our public research institutes are ranked very highly but where we lack is a translation of that research into commercial outcomes.  So the ability to unlock the research is going to be key for this statement to have long term impact."

The growing Start-up community in Australia is hoping that the new attitude to innovation will help keep young entrepreneurial talent in Australia.