Australian IT Competitive but Innovation Needed
Australian IT Competitive but Innovation Needed
August 3, 2007 Although Australia’s IT industry remains globally competitive, a lack of innovation, research and development, alongside a lack of support of home-grown IT organisations is hindering the progression of the sector.
The news comes off the back of an international study launched by the Business Software Alliance. The report labelled ‘The means to compete: Benchmarking IT industry Competitiveness,” polled 64 countries against each other to determine their IT mark on the globe based on a number of significant factors including; overall business environment, infrastructure, human capital, legal environment, support for IT industry development and research and development.
Globally, Australia came in at fifth place in terms of overall global competitiveness but while Australia performed consistently in most categories, a significant gap was noted in the local focus on research and development.
“In the IT sector, we find the support here appears to mainly go to multi-nationals who set up here, rather than local organisations,” Jeffrey Hardee, VP and regional director of BSA told IDM.
“For research and development, patents registered are really important and a good indicator,” he says. “And it’s an areas that indicates Australia does not have a lot of innovation going on. That’s something we believe the government really needs to look at. The innovation is not owned by Australians.”
Hardee also notes the local skills shortage as a major problem. “In terms of capacity, staff are trained very well, but the number of students coming up is not enough,” he says.
The BSA says this report outlines for the first time, where Australia stands both regionally and globally as an IT superpower and also measures the success of industry of government IT initiatives.
“We can see from the results that Australia’s strongest suits are its advanced IT infrastructure, human capital development overall highly competitive business environment,” says Hardee. “The levels of competition occurring across all levels of industry in Australia also apply to the IT industry, translating into a successful sector.
Australia scored an IT Industry Competitiveness Index benchmark of 66.5, coming in fifth behind the United States (77.4), Japan (72.7), South Korea (67.2) and the UK (67.1.)
Hardee, alongside Goh Seow Hiong, director of software policy at BSA, are currently taking the results of the BSA study to governments across the region and will take the results to Canberra this week.