Beyond Startups: Australia's Path to Building World-Class Industry Sectors

“It doesn’t work. We’ve tried many times and the results are always disappointing. We don’t see the value so we rarely fund these types of activities any more. The environment is too complex.”

Even with the best of intentions, many initiatives aimed at fostering collaboration across an industry sector, encouraging a diverse array of people and organizations to innovate together for mutual benefit, fail. The initiatives end up on the scrap heap, and we revert back to the business as usual ones we are familiar with. The ones that focus on the tech innovators, and help them build their companies and bring groundbreaking new products to market. We know these initiatives will generate results we can feel good about.

But it wasn’t always this way. Not that many years ago, we were not very good at these either. Starting from scratch we have created a world-class startup ecosystem that has fostered an incredible array of successful companies. It is not a stretch to believe we can do the same again, level up our skills and build new industry sectors. If we are to embed emerging Australian technologies into our economy, rather than see the benefits flow overseas, this is a step we need to take.

We can learn a lot from the attempts we have made and initiatives we have run in the past. There are many questions we can be asking ourselves.

How sophisticated was the design of past cross-industry collaboration programs? Were they more bark hut than Opera House? Were we hoping that running information sessions or events that brought people together would be enough? Did we tailor programs to the unique characteristics of the sector they were supporting, or did we roll out a one-size-fits-all solution? Did we take the time to properly understand the constraints that needed to be unlocked for an industry sector, and design interventions that specifically addressed them???

When initiatives failed to deliver the results we were looking for, did we iterate and have another go at improving our impact, or just drop them? Not all sectors are going to engage through no fault of the initiatives. Knowing which ones will engage helps us to allocate resources to areas where we can generate the most impact. Did we factor this in when assessing results?

There are valuable lessons we can learn by answering these questions. There are also valuable lessons coming from leading economic theorists studying the way other countries have embraced these challenges, and the approaches they have taken. We can take inspiration from international examples but shouldn’t take them at face value.?

The Australian economy is different to every other economy in the world. We need to take an evidence based approach to figuring out what will work here, design tailored activities that are fit for purpose and iterate our approach until we get it right. This the fastest path to impact, and luckily an approach we are very familiar with - it’s Lean. We’ve got this.

Imagine in a few years time talking about the dozens of new sectors we have helped create, the many successful companies thriving in global markets, and the jobs and prosperity that has been added to the Australian economy. There is a world of opportunity for us to take a systematic approach to building new industry sectors, extending our innovation capability beyond building startups. And there’s no question - these are results we will also feel incredibly good about!?