Future cities: UK mission to Australia

12 Mar 2018 11:51 AM

Innovate UK to take 15 entrepreneurs to Sydney and Melbourne to support collaboration and break into the global advanced urban services market.

Next week (12 and 16 March ), 15 UK entrepreneurs will travel to Sydney and Melbourne, Australia as part of an Innovate UK future cities mission.

These cities have demonstrated significant progress in sustainable living and smart infrastructure. The UK businesses to use the observations and connections they make on the visit to grow and scale up.

They will:

Find out more about how Innovate UK supports urban innovation.

The organisations

The entrepreneurs represent some of the UK’s most innovative companies. They include:

Why Australia

Australia was chosen because it is highly urbanised. It has taken a country-wide approach to smart city creation following the release of its government’s 2016 Smart Cities Plan.

Currently, 89% of the population live in urban areas in the country, which means it already faces a number of challenges. These include:

Many of these challenges also affect the UK and their impact will grow as we head into the future.

Innovate UK’s missions

Our missions are intended to improve businesses’ access to knowledge, markets, skills and partners based outside of the UK to help remove the barriers to global growth.

They give businesses the opportunity to meet with potential collaborators and learn about local markets, new technologies and opportunities.

Previous missions have seen delegations taken to India and South East Asia.

This future cities mission to Australia is run by Innovate UK with the Department for International Trade and the Knowledge Transfer Network.

To find out about future opportunities email James Taplin, Innovation Lead, Innovate UK at james.taplin@innovateuk.gov.uk.