Entrepreneurs
in Australia are not seeing the country as startup-friendly with only 29 per
cent saying “cultural support” is available.
A
new report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) scored Australia the lowest for
“cultural support”, which includes risk tolerance, successful role models,
innovation and so on.
Vivek Sood, managing director of Global
Supply Chain Group, said Australia lacked a Silicon Valley culture: “Even
today Aussies who have an innovative streak prefer to go overseas to Silicon
Valley type of eco-spheres that bring out the best in them.”
Mr
Sood, who started his business in Sydney 14 years ago, said although innovation was clear at policy making
level, allocated funding had not yielded desirable results due to
misapplications or what he described as a bureaucratic nightmare.
The
WEF found that as part of the “cultural support” component, Australia’s
tolerance for risk and failure was rated particularly low, even though all
Australia/New Zealand respondents considered it an important factor to
startups’ growth.
Professor
Ron Johnston, Executive Director of the Australian Centre for Innovation
(ACIIC) recognised that risk management techniques were reasonably well
developed; and that the application of risk management techniques in government
departments usually led them to avoiding risks.
“It
is not so much [about] risk management techniques, it is attitude towards risks,”
he said.
Only
50 per cent of respondents in the WEF study thought Australia had an available
research culture, while the local Freelancer.com said the country lacked
graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Professor
Johnston said: “Australia’s production of scientists and engineers is
proportionate to its population, of course while way behind the US and now
China.”
The
WEF asked startup businesses to rank countries on eight factors with Australia
scoring an overall ranking of 53 per cent, well behind countries such as the US,
UK, Switzerland and Singapore.
Mr
Sood said more should be done: “All I ask is that startups
should get fair hearing in the board rooms when they rock up to present their
offerings in competition with the established players.”