News

The Interview: Bruce Billson

Bruce Billson is having an outstanding year. The indefatigable Small Business Minister has enjoyed success in his portfolio like no one else in Cabinet as the key driver behind...

Tech drives NSW Telstra awards

A twenty-year veteran of the FinTech sector and a success story from the original dotcom boom took the top gong for medium-sized businesses at the NSW Telstra Business Awards...

Inflated job claims don’t help policy

When you recognise that the only way to really increase the nation’s wealth – as measured by GDP/capita – is by increasing productivity, making the case for innovation is...

Adelaide delivers driverless cars

Driverless cars have been getting a bit of attention recently, but most people think they are still some way in the future. They may be closer than you think,...

Joe Hockey loves small business

Joe Hockey continues to conflate the notional idea of what a small business is and what a startup company is. This is not a sackable offense for a Treasurer,...

Govt should pay Super venture fees

The Federal Government should consider underwriting the management fees of venture capital firms to attract large-scale institutional investors like the superannuation funds, Starfish Ventures founders John Dyson and Michael...

SIVs may distort Aussie VC sector

The famine-to-feast nature of the Significant Investor Visa money expected to hit the Australian venture capital market could do more harm than good, according to one of the industry’s...

Industry must drive collaboration

One challenge for Christopher Pyne’s panel reviewing research commercialisation is getting the business community to acknowledge its poor performance on business-university collaboration. While the OECD rates Australia as last...

Hope, or just a hopeless joke?

Question: What is a ‘National Reform Summ’? Answer: It’s a ‘National Reform Summit’ without IT! Both the AFR and The Australian have announced that they are supporting the National Reform...

Super dreams – where’s the money?

It is surely a policy failure that Australia is home to one of the world’s largest superannuation pools and yet struggles to fund its own home-grown innovators. This failure...

ChAFTA misses ICT opportunities

The latest phase of China’s so-called ‘going out’ program, a classic corporate-state strategy of targeting industries and specific companies, has now locked-in on innovation. China’s top leadership are desperate...

Creating better research returns

Chris Pyne’s higher education research review addresses a familiar problem in Australia that has been looking for a long term solution for decades. That is, the nation produces some...

ICT key to agri-tech advances

The long awaited Agricultural Competitiveness White Paper does a far better job than the Government’s earlier Industry Innovation and Competitiveness Agenda in recognising the role for ICT innovation in...

China tech trade a rounding error

What does the Free Trade Agreement mean for Australia’s technology industries? And what does it mean for our longer term relationship with China? The agreement (officially known as ‘ChAFTA’)...