Adelaide fails to rate as top digital industry hub
Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra were all named ‘super-clusters’ of digital activity in a new report, while Adelaide didn’t make the cut.
A new CSIRO report has carved out four geographic ‘super-clusters’ of digital technology activity in Australia, but Adelaide was relegated to a lower tier.
Released this week, the report says Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra were ‘super-clusters’, making them “Australia’s largest and most significant agglomerations of digital companies and workers”.
Adelaide, however, was included on a lower rung and labelled a ‘greater capital city cluster’. The report’s understanding of the Adelaide cluster included the geographic areas of Mawson Lakes/Globe Derby Park, Payneham/Felixstow and Adelaide City.
Notably this leaves the Tonsley Innovation District out, and ranks Adelaide alongside Perth, Darwin and Hobart.
Via CSIRO
The CSIRO looked at ABS data to find the number of digital industry workers in a region as a percentage of the number of workers in a region. This was then compared to the number of Australian digital tech workers as a percentage of total workers to determine a ‘location quotient’, or LQ.
Adelaide City’s LQ was 1.98, while Mawson Lakes’ was 2.08 and Payneham’s was 2.9; nothing to scoff at though, with the CSIRO noting that LQs ranging from 1.5-3 were “evidence of significant specialisation”.
The ‘super-clusters’ significantly outperformed the rest of the nation on the LQ measure, with all of the ‘Sydney arc’ rating above 2.0. Lavender Bay was the top performer in the NSW capital with an LQ of 5.2, and Redfern landed a 4.8.
It was a similar story in the ‘Melbourne diamond’ with Docklands rating at 4.8. In the Queensland capital, six regions made up the ‘Brisbane corridor’, while in Canberra nine regions met the CSIRO’s criteria for national significance.
The report also detailed the top regions in Australia for where digital professionals were based across specific jobs, but Adelaide suburbs only took two of the spots. Salisbury North was 10th in the nation for the agglomeration of database administration professionals, while Norwood was 19th in Australia for the number of graphic designers based there.
As for the geographic location of tech investors, the report said there were no major backers in South Australia, with the top 15 all interstate.
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