Australian geography of innovative entrepreneurship

"This paper explores the patterns of innovative entrepreneurship in Australia, showing the distribution and concentration of business creation, research and development (R&D), patenting and trademark activity across various regions of Australia. When innovation and entrepreneurship activities are examined geographically within Australia relative to the size of a region’s population, the paper finds that during the period 2008–14 these activities are concentrated in the major metropolitan areas of Australia, Sydney in particular.

Innovation and entrepreneurship go hand in hand. There are no regions in Australia where high IP generation does not occur in tandem with high entrepreneurship. It was found that an increase in the number of patents and trademarks in a given region was positively associated with an increase in the number of business entries. In addition, for every 1 per cent increase in R&D expenditure, a 0.35 per cent increase was observed in patent application counts and a 0.40 per cent increase in trademark application counts.

Significant convergence of high levels of innovation activity and business creation was observed in areas of New South Wales and Queensland, where large numbers of businesses were generated in the Professional, Scientific and Technical Services industry. The presence of publicly funded research organisations in a region, particularly those hosting Centres of Excellence and Cooperative Research Centres, produced levels of patenting and trademarking three and a half times higher than the national average. Regions that host these research centres were also found to have twice as many businesses in the Professional, Scientific and Technical Services industry." Read the paper

Samira Hassan, Stan Bucifal, Paul Drake and Luke Hendrickson Office of the Chief Economist Sep 2015