Australia aims to boost innovation and entrepreneurship

It places major emphasis on changing culture to embrace change and innovation.

Australia’s government is to spend more than $A300 million on a new strategy for tackling methamphetamine.

Included in the statement are tax breaks for early-stage investors, changes to insolvency laws, a new $200 million co-investment fund and added support for incubators and accelerators.

The Government says it wants to change the way it does business by having a single body responsible for the long-term direction of its innovation plan, through a new statutory board badged as Innovation and Science Australia.

Eligible companies must have expenditure of less than $1 million and income less than $200,000 in the previous income year.

There will also be incentives in the form of tax offsets for investments in startups.

Around $70 million will be provided from the government, while the remainder will come from the private sector and revenue generated by the CSIRO’s WLAN program.

“Australia is falling behind on measures of commercialization and collaboration”, Turnbull said in a statement.

This is expected to help start-ups and big business plug the skills gap.

Data61, formerly NICTA, will be getting $75 million in funding back after it was stripped by the Abbott government, leading it to merge with the CSIRO.

The changes took Australia “some way, but not all the way” to the American Chapter 11 system.

A new entrepreneur visa will be introduced to help attract talent from overseas, and initiatives will encourage more of the thousands of foreign students graduating at masters-by-research and doctorate level in STEM and computing areas to stay in Australia.

This had been a problem for a long time, especially for small and medium businesses.

To help close the gap, the government is offering grants of up to $100,000 for entrepreneurs to test their ideas over three to six months, with the most successful ideas eligible for a further grant of up to $1 million.

The idea of establishing a UK-style digital marketplace for IT services has been promoted within the government as a form of “iTunes for digital services” that agencies could explore when looking for a solution for their needs.

The federal government has unveiled its long-awaited $1 billion innovation statement in a bid to foster greater collaboration between small businesses and the public sector.

“Modern digital technologies, so important in the regions for bridging the tyranny of distance, can enable regional, rural and remote Australians to get involved in new industries and job opportunities”.

Let’s hope that the policy is followed-up with the removal of Australia’s draconian metadata laws, which are likely to stifle the development of Australia’s internet-based industry, including start-ups, as well as reform of negative gearing and/or the capital gains tax discount, which have jointly diverted the nation’s capital away from productive investment (including start-ups) into non-productive housing.

It said women occupy fewer than one in five senior researcher positions at universities and research institutions in the country and account for approximately one quarter of the overall STEM workforce.