I acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, Traditional Custodians of the land on which we meet, and pay my respects to Elders past and present.
UTS Startups
Murray [Hurps], thank you for convening us and for what you are building here at UTS. The scale and ambition of UTS Startups is remarkable. It reaches students, alumni and schools, offers free access to desks and support, and has grown student interest in entrepreneurship from about one third to over one half in recent years. It is producing jobs, internships and real‑world capability that spills over into the broader economy.
It is a treat to be in a room of builders: from Stone and Chalk and Fishburners to Cicada, EnergyLab and The Melt; from UNSW Founders and I2N to Spark Festival. Most people are very good at explaining why something can't be done. Founders specialise in proving them wrong. And support organisations like yours provide the scaffolding that lets those efforts stand tall.
The case for startup support organisations
Startup support organisations are the connective tissue of an innovation economy. You lower search costs between ideas, talent, customers and capital. You coach founders through the messy middle. You convert research assets into commercial capability.
That role becomes critical when an economy has strong research outputs but an uneven mechanism for translation. Australia does well on publications and citations. Yet too often Australia celebrates the paper and outsources the product. That pattern carries a hidden cost: Australia pays more, waits longer, and imports capability that could have been built domestically. As the Strategic Examination of R&D's discussion paper noted in February of this year, the real prize is not simply producing knowledge, but embedding it in firms and industries.
Adoption is not enough
For decades Australia has relied on fast follower adoption. Adoption matters, but it is no longer sufficient. Productivity growth has stalled despite many firms describing themselves as innovation active. Only 1-2 per cent of Australian firms engage in innovation that is new to the world. As the Productivity Commission has noted, many Australian businesses may not realise how far they sit from the frontier. It's like a track athlete running alongside the race leader, unaware that they're being lapped.
The experimental development gap
Where translation often falters is in experimental development - the gritty work of moving from prototype to product. High R&D intensity economies invest heavily in this stage, usually inside firms and alongside customers. Australia invests less. Universities have stepped up in applied research, but industry needs to meet this effort so that ideas are pulled through to market. Otherwise, Australia risks building a conveyor belt of discoveries that stop short of the factory floor.
Startups as a translation engine
Startups are Australia's nimblest translators. They are where ambition meets urgency. Australia has a vibrant but still maturing scene, with strong idea flow and energetic precincts, but weak connections to universities and capital that is skewed toward familiar plays rather than deep tech. None of this is a criticism. It is a design brief. If Australia wants more firms building hard things, it needs an ecosystem that shortens the distance between lab bench and first customer, and that is patient enough to fund pilots, verification and scale.
Competition and business dynamism
Founders thrive when markets are open, entry costs are low and incumbents expect to be challenged. That is why competition policy and startup policy belong together. Work on mergers, non‑competes and data portability is not housekeeping. It is about ensuring that new entrants get a fair go.
Capability as well as capital
Capital is necessary and insufficient. Capability is what turns dollars into durable firms. People point to 3 notable gaps:
- Customer access, especially in regulated and business to business markets.
- Product engineering, taking ideas through design for manufacture, verification, validation and certification.
- Leadership bandwidth, so founder teams can sell, ship and still sleep.
Support organisations can - and many of you already do - provide solutions: demand led challenges, shared regulatory expertise, test facilities, fractional executives, and venture studios that spread playbooks across campuses. The biggest hurdles remain customer acquisition, talent, and time.
Universities as co‑founders, not spectators
Australian research is especially strong in biomedical, computing and physical sciences. Yet when it comes to productivity, the key question is not how good the paper is, but who the customer is. The strongest models treat the university as a co‑founder with clear intellectual property settings, co located lab and venture teams, and mobility in both directions. Academics doing tours of duty in startups, and operators contributing to teaching. That is how you build absorptive capacity as well as discovery capacity.
Large and small together
Over the past 15 years, business R&D as a share of GDP has fallen. Australian small and medium firms carry too much of the business R&D load. By comparison, in other advanced nations, large enterprises are more likely to anchor experimental development and supply chains. Australia needs more big with small: procurement that buys from the frontier, corporate venture that goes beyond branding and testbeds where safety critical sectors can trial locally. Support organisations are the honest brokers who can make those marriages work.
Deep tech and patient pathways
Hard tech founders do not need cheerleading. They need time, testbeds and offtake. If Australia wants more climate, medtech, advanced manufacturing and robotics firms, it should prioritise shared facilities for build and test cycles, regulatory wayfinders that compress approvals, mission oriented demand that turns pilots into orders, and export first coaching so global markets are assumed, not bolted on.
Equity and entry
Talent is widely distributed. Opportunity is not. Australia needs more founders from low socioeconomic backgrounds, more women and more First Nations entrepreneurs in every cohort. Murray Hurps' Startup Muster survey, now in its twelfth year, is shining a light on who is starting firms and what is holding them back. Two practical steps help: track your applicants, not just who gets in; and publish simple outcome dashboards so that the whole ecosystem can see where to widen the funnel.
The next sprint
That brings me to why we are here. The real expertise is in this room. You know where the bottlenecks are and what would help you move faster. To kick us off, let me pose a few questions. Think of them not as exam questions, but as prompts - because the best ideas often come when someone in the room says 'that will never work' and another replies 'want to bet?'
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Shared facilities: What labs or maker spaces would help most, and how do we make them easier to use?
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Creating customers: Which agencies or big firms could be first customers, and how do we make that process quicker?
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University pipelines: What changes would help more ideas move from universities into startups?
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Bringing founders together: What's the simplest way to get more founders, investors and mentors bumping into each other?
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Access to capital: How do startups secure the early cheques needed for prototypes, pilots and first customers?
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Showing progress: What are the best signs that Australia is getting better at turning ideas into startups and startups into scale ups?
What I will take back
From my side, I am listening for where rules slow you down so that they can be simplified. Where a modest public investment would unlock large private effort. Where better data would change behaviour, because transparency still works.
Closing
Australia has never lacked ideas or grit. What it has lacked at times is a system that makes it easy for a founder to find a first customer, for a lab to find a manufacturer, and for a small company to grow into a large one without moving overseas. If Australia can tighten those connections - adoption plus creation, research plus development, startup plus scale up - it can shift the production function of the whole economy.
Murray and the UTS team, thank you for hosting. I am keen to hear from each of you, not only about the barriers, but about what is working and how we scale it.
