Strategies to drive Lot Fourteen focus sectors

South Australia’s Space Sector Strategy has been launched to drive the state’s contribution to the Australian Space Agency’s goal of tripling the size of the nation’s domestic space industry to $12 billion by 2030, helping to create thousands of jobs.

South Australia will focus its activities in space industry and research to propel the state’s growth in the sector and contribute to the national agenda.

The state government has now launched strategies covering three of the priority sectors at Lot Fourteen innovation precinct – space, hi-tech, and creative industries. A strategy for the fourth focus sector, defence, will be launched soon.

The strategies have been developed in collaboration with industry as crucial elements of South Australia’s broader Growth State Strategy, a partnership between the South Australian government and industry to accelerate the state’s economy through business expansion and job creation.

Lot Fourteen is home to the Australian Space Agency, the SmartSat CRC and local and international space industry companies. The Australian Space Discovery Centre and the Mission Control Centre will open their doors at Lot Fourteen in early 2021.

Launching the strategy at the 10th Australian Space Forum in Adelaide, Premier Steven Marshall said South Australia’s space sector would be critical in the state’s economic recovery from the global coronavirus pandemic.

“South Australia is unequivocally the home of space and this strategy sets a framework for South Australia to reach for the stars,” Premier Marshall said.

“Businesses in the space sector will be creating thousands of job opportunities for South Australians over the next decade which is great for our economy.

“Our vision for growth is simple – by 2030, South Australia will be designing, manufacturing, launching, and operating SmallSats (small satellites) to deliver actionable, space-derived intelligence for sovereign Australian missions – creating hundreds of jobs in the process.

“While the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has unequivocally affected the space sector, South Australia’s space sector growth target projects above average growth of 5.8% for the next ten years.

The strategy focusses on launches into accessible lower Earth orbits, machine learning and artificial intelligence to exploit space-derived data, technological advances to develop small satellites, expanding a skilled workforce, and building on the state’s innovation ecosystem.

The Hi-Tech Sector Plan is the culmination of extensive industry consultation and research to provide insight into the opportunities, challenges and priority actions to grow this rapidly advancing sector.

Representatives of the sector at Lot Fourteen include the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, the Australian Cyber Collaboration Centre, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology bigdata Living Lab, Presagen, Life Whisperer, Chamonix and Cortex Interactive.

The plan will help stimulate a new era in innovation productivity and growth to see South Australia become a globally recognised destination for the sector. It sets an ambitious growth target of 6 per cent per annum for the sector through to 2030, with a focus on the strategic priorities of strengthening technical capability, connections and collaboration, new jobs and career pathways, and market access and development.

The Hi-Tech Sector Plan identifies eight frontier technologies that will support economic growth in South Australia: Industry 4.0; cyber security; quantum computing; Internet of Things; computer vision, augmented reality and virtual reality; block chain; artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced data analytics; optics and photonics.

The Creative Industries Strategy has a target of five per cent growth per annum to 2030, with the sector now contributing $1.2 billion to the state’s economy.

Minister for Innovation and Skills David Pisoni said achieving the target would see the gross value added for the sector nearly double to $2.1b by 2030.

He said industry has identified that, in order to make South Australia a state where creative businesses could thrive, an holistic and collaborative approach should be taken to developing and strengthening key elements, from education through to export.

“This ranges from embedding creative skills development into all levels of education, through to businesses collaborating with universities and VET providers to ensure courses are flexible enough to meet future workforce capability needs.,” he said.

Minister for Trade and Investment Stephen Patterson said South Australia’s creative ecosystem was growing rapidly, inspiring new enterprises and attracting the industry’s top global talent.

“The creative industries’ impressive capability – including virtual reality and augmented reality – is of importance to other key growth sectors.

“This capability is increasingly being used in areas such as defence, mining, space, health care, automotive, engineering, and even tourism.”

Lot Fourteen is home to Artisan Post Group, which provides post production services to the film, television and content creation industry, as well as virtual reality specialist Jumpgate VR, infrastructure visualisation company Convergen and film producers Dancing Road Productions.

Strategy documents can be accessed here.