The City of Melbourne released a draft Startup Action Plan 2017-2021, with the aim of enabling more startups and entrepreneurs to ‘start, grow and go global’ from Melbourne over the next four years and beyond.
The City of Melbourne worked with more than 400 local stakeholders over the past 12 months to tailor the plan. The plan has 12 targeted actions to support startups through the five life stages: welcome, found, funding, growth, go global. These actions are covered across the following four themes:
- Sustainable growth: Support services to help businesses attract talent, investment and customers across all life stages of a business.
- Places for innovation: Open and accessible places for community innovation.
- Inclusive and collaborative culture: Programs that support our startup community’s unique collaborative culture.
- Adaptive governance: Access to key data, resources and business opportunities for local startups.
Action areas under the ‘Sustainable Growth’ theme include enhancement of the city’s business readiness support services for startups and support for innovation competitions and research programs that connect students to startups, and help commercialise the intellectual property of local research institutions.
Innovation districts network and expanding the existing ‘maker hubs’ in City of Melbourne libraries would provide ‘Places for innovation.’ The City will support support greater access to affordable and new forms of meeting and working spaces, labs, shop fronts and open spaces for startups, including Council-owned and private sector spaces (e.g. Town Hall meeting rooms, District Hall).
To develop the right culture, skills-building programs will be provided, incorporating the values of diversity and inclusion and channels will be established to connect with respected startup community members, so that they can provide continuous feedback on the effectiveness of the City of Melbourne's startup actions and the community's evolving needs.
Under governance, startup community members will be helped to gain access to key resources, such as data via an open and accessible digital platform. Steps will be taken to make it easier for the City to engage startups as suppliers via procurement innovation.
The draft plan is due for consideration by the Council on 27 June 2017.
Read the complete draft plan here.