The new not-for-profit organisation "StartupAUS" has released the report "Crossroads: An Action Plan to Develop a Vibrant tech startup ecosystem in Australia" (15 August 2014): http://startupaus.org/crossroads/
The report makes some useful recommendations, such as Young Entrepreneur Scholarships and a national network of student start-up incubators, national learn to code promotion program, tertiary scholarships program to drive participation in CS, national network of entrepreneurship centres. The report is deficient for not proposing formal education programs for entrepreneurs. Australian universities have a number of schemes to encourage students and researchers to apply their skills to setting up new businesses. However, these tend to be extra-curricular activities, not part of formal courses. I suggest this should be a core part of courses, acknowledged as a respectable subject for academic analysis. The report focuses too much on on the import of staff from the USA, rather than training Australians and working with growth areas in Asia. The the report does not make clear who funded it (presumably Google Australia), or who wrote it. Also it would help if the report was provided as a well formatted web document, not badly formatted PDF. Here is an extract from the report's action plan summary, reformatted by hand to HTML: http://blog.tomw.net.au/2014/04/proposals-for-encouraging-young.html -- Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150 The Higher Education Whisperer http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/ PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia http://www.tomw.net.au Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science, Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/ _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
