A new report from Deloitte Access Economics reveals that the Victorian start-up ecosystem has outperformed growth expectations from those forecast in 2020.
The Scaling up: Growing the economic opportunity for Victoria’s start-up ecosystem report highlights thye fact that Victoria’s entire ecosystem value has almost doubled since the last report in 2020, up from $50 billion to $91 billion. The sector has experienced a rapid expansion of its start-up workforce, which increased from 37,000 in 2020 to 52,000 FTE jobs in 2022, despite Victoria’s population having declined for the first time in almost 30 years.
LaunchVic CEO, Dr Kate Cornick explained that start-ups accounted for a significant share of productivity growth and had become a critical ingredient to the economy’s performance, thus providing huge potential for Victoria.
“In a period of just two years we have seen start-up jobs grow by 20 per cent annually and in fact double from those recorded between 2018 and 2020,” Dr Cornick said. “The fundamentals are in place for strong ecosystem growth in Victoria but to keep this momentum going and build on this rapid growth to date, continued investment is essential.”
The report also explored what Victoria’s economy could look like if its start-up ecosystem resembled the international benchmarks of Singapore and Tel Aviv. What it found is that associated growth in start-up density and scale-up success rates will have significant impacts on productivity, employment, and the broader Victorian economy over the next 20 years.
By 2042, Victoria’s GSP could be $6.9 billion higher, growing to the density of Singapore, or $10.2 billion higher if it grows to the density of Tel Aviv. This amounts to an increase in GSP of between $26.9 billion and $35.8 billion in net present value (NPV) terms over the modelled period. It noted that such growth will create between 19,400 and 30,200 additional FTE jobs (cumulatively) by 2042, or between 8150 and 12,350 additional jobs annually over the modelled period.
