Start-ups are the key vehicle for job growth

09-Jul-2010

A ground breaking new report by Tim Kane, a senior Fellow of the US based Kauffman Foundation highlights the vast importance of start-ups when it comes to job creation and job growth. (To view the report in full please Click Here)

The study team researched job creation in the US between 1977 and 2005. The key finding was that there would have been no net job growth in the US over that period without start-up businesses.

Established and larger firms certainly create jobs but they also simultaneously destroy them. Firms in their first year of existence added an average of 3 million jobs per year in the US, whereas existing firms actually destroyed jobs in 21 of the 28 years studied.

So start-ups work. Start-ups create new, additional jobs.

The Innovation Centre is concerned that the Sunshine Coast has too few opportunities for high quality careers in twenty-first century knowledge based opportunities. 

Too few relative to what? Too few relative to the thousands of school leavers looking for job opportunities each year. Too few relative to the thousands of bright graduates emerging from TAFE and the University of the Sunshine Coast. Too few relative to today’s population of 330,000 people and definitely too few for the 500,000 people who will call the Sunshine Coast home within 15-20 years.

The Innovation Centre believes that a new wave of start-up businesses can create many thousands of much needed jobs for the Coast. The Innovation Centre provides the essential business-support infrastructure to meet the needs of home-grown start-ups.

Founded in 2002 as a subsidiary of the University of the Sunshine Coast, the Innovation Centre comprises both a Business Incubator, to help nurture new ideas from their most embryonic stages, and also a Business Accelerator, for those that show the greatest commercialising potential or are in need of expansion. The support extends well beyond just office space; fledgling companies get mentoring advice, professional and legal services and introductions to potential customers, partners and investors.

To date the Innovation Centre has supported the start-up and growth of over 60 businesses – mainly in ICT, Cleantech and Creative Industry sectors - creating over 400 jobs. Start-ups work, start-ups create new jobs for the region.

With additional support from both the public and private sector many more entrepreneurs will have the support they need to create thousands of much needed jobs across the Sunshine Coast region. Join the Innovation Centre on this mission. Join us as an entrepreneur with a new business or do it as a supporter and share your skills, expertise and networks or as a key program sponsor so that one day you can look back and say ‘I helped shape this region’.

Colin Graham
CEO, Innovation Centre Sunshine Coast.

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