Sustaining and Growing a Competitive ICT Industry in Ballarat

We concur with the conclusions of the McKinsey and Company study which identifies that the Australian ICT sector, (and in our view the Ballarat cluster specifically), will face challenges in attracting multinational investment, competing in a market where international brands are most trusted, and innovating and producing in fragmented markets. Nevertheless, there are still significant opportunities for the industry around:

Advanced applications with industries and firms that are globally competitive and users of ICT; e.g. Mining, Games, Mechanical handling in the food industry, Agriculture, Health.
Development of specialist functional skills to service large ICT suppliers or their customers.
Development of advanced networking solutions and intelligent networks, social network computing and GPS applications.
Providing advanced capability in data storage, data processing, data mining and knowledge extraction for any organisation in the world but in particular locally.