Melbourne and regional Victoria offer world-class talent, state-of-the-art research and development infrastructure, an innovative technology ecosystem, strong business opportunities, a robust economy and a cost-competitive business environment.
Melbourne has been named as one of the best cities in the world for tech firms to operate in. Melbourne ranked 22 in the top 30 global cities on the Savills UK Tech Cities in Motion report. The Victorian capital achieved a higher rank than Seoul, the home of Samsung, and China’s tech capital Shenzhen.
How ranking is calculated
The ranking considered the availability of venture capital, whether a city was on the radar for global tech companies, if it was an attractive city to live and work in and if it generated and attracted tech talent. The areas where Melbourne tends to do well in are health sciences and online digital platforms.
Victoria’s ICT industry is made up of over 8,000 companies, including 11 of the top 20 Australian technology companies. Many international companies are located in Victoria including: IBM, Microsoft, HP, Motorola, NEC, Ericsson, EMC, Cisco, Intel, Thales, Fujitsu, Hitachi and Bosch.
R&D Cluster
Melbourne has one of the largest ICT R&D clusters in the Southern Hemisphere, producing world-leading, commercially focused research. It has become known as the ‘hatching’ capital of Australia because of its strong R&D base, supportive start-up environments and numerous cooperative working spaces around the city.
Research institutes include:
- The Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative is a A$100 million high-performance computational facility – the largest supercomputer facility devoted to the life sciences in the world.
- The Centre of Energy Efficient Telecommunications is a partnership between Bell Labs (Alcatel Lucent and the University of Melbourne) and is one of the largest research efforts on green telecommunications in the world.
- CSIRO's Data61 is Australia’s leading data innovation group, officially formed in 2016 from the integration of CSIRO’s Digital Productivity flagship and the National ICT Australia Ltd (NICTA)
- IBM’s Global R&D Laboratory
- The Microsoft Centre of Social Natural User Interfaces (NUI) at the University of Melbourne
- The Centre for Technology Infusion based at La Trobe University
- Victoria University’s Centre for Applied Informatics (CAI)
- The Internet 4 Things research group at Swinburne University
- The Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information is actively involved in IP Generation and broad sector spatial solutions.
Read more about Victoria's strong economy and competitive business environment on the Invest Victoria website.
If you're interested in study or research in ICT, you might like to read more about Melbourne's strengths in technology
Melbourne is Australia's technology hub and is home to more than half of Australia's top 20 technology companies. See more videos like this on the Invest Victoria YouTube channel.