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High-tech hub for Sippy Downs
1 March 2008
Thursday’s signing of a Memorandum of Understanding by Maroochy Shire Council, private land owners and the University is a significant step in creating an overdue technology hub as part of the growing Sippy Downs.
Across the last 30 years there has been a definitive trend in how technology parks, hubs, or precincts emerge as successful. They are co-located, and have close research links with universities or research institutes. Those established in commercial or residential precincts, detached from universities, have failed in large number in North America and Europe.
The reasons are clear and centre on the needs of high-tech companies for research, and a supply of graduates educated for careers in those or similar companies.
The Sunshine Coast desperately needs a high-tech hub where new jobs and careers can be created in the volumes we know we need for the growth of the Coast. We cannot rely on the building industry and tourism alone, into the future. Education has already surged past tourism at the national level as an export earner, and soon education and research will surpass tourism at traditional tourist locations throughout the country.
The Coast has many lifestyle attractions for developing high-tech industries and we have to exploit those through this MOU marketing strategy in order to strengthen this economy across the long term.
Such industries do not proliferate on the Coast at present and we remain a long way behind some other areas in terms of the highly skilled and qualified, but the demographics are changing.
When you consider how economies worldwide have been turned around or kick-started in the last 20 or 30 years, whilst we have got a lot of catching up to do, we nevertheless have many advantages to make a fast start: lifestyle, climate, an amalgamated Council, a rapidly growing university and some powerful researchers in early and mid-career, and now some sympathetic nearby private stakeholders who also want to grow a technology precinct to make Sippy Downs the distinctive sub-regional centre envisaged in the South-East Queensland Regional Plan.
If places like South Wales, Ireland, Catalonia and Norway can create successes and become world leaders, so can we, with concerted and focussed agendas, rather than dissipated or competing agendas.
There are huge markets emerging near us in this part of the globe and we need to ensure we are playing our part in developing marketable products to export to them, rather than waiting for them to develop their capacity and dominate our markets. We are already outsourcing heavily to India.
The Strategic Marketing MOU for the technology park is, therefore, the start of that focussed long-term commitment to develop Sippy Downs as the research-driven high-tech hub for, and connected with, the whole Sunshine Coast.
Professor Paul Thomas AM is Vice-Chancellor at the University of the Sunshine Coast.