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Small business conference ‘significant for region’

September 27, 2005

AudretschHutch.thmb.jpgA conference at The University of New England on small business development is a significant event for the New England region as a whole, according to an international authority speaking at the conference.

Professor David Audretsch, Director of the Institute for Development Strategies at Indiana University in the United States, said the conference would “help to make clear the links between entrepreneurs and the University in the development of the region”.

“Entrepreneurship is the mechanism by which regional investments and new knowledge (in the form of university research and education) generate a return to the public in the form of high-quality, sustainable job growth,” he explained. “Universities such as UNE, working together with private enterprise, are thus crucial players in regional development through the transfer of technology and the commercialisation of knowledge.”

Professor Audretsch was the first keynote speaker at the 18th Annual Conference of the Small Enterprise Association of Australia and New Zealand (SEAANZ). The conference, from the 26th to the 28th of September, has attracted more than 100 delegates from throughout Australia, and from New Zealand, Malaysia, the UK and the United States. The theme of the conference is the role of small and medium sized enterprises in rural, regional and urban development.

“Small business and entrepreneurship have become the engine of growth in job generation and international competition,” Professor Audretsch told the conference. “Through them, new ideas that would otherwise not become commercialised are injected into the marketplace. This explains why policy everywhere (local, regional and national) now has a major focus on creating entrepreneurial economies.”

In officially opening the conference, the Vice-Chancellor of UNE, Professor Ingrid Moses, emphasised the vital role of small business in rural and regional Australia. Professor Moses congratulated the convener of the conference, UNE’s Professor Patrick Hutchinson, on the conference itself and on the “Travelling Experts Seminar” that will follow it on the afternoon of Wednesday 28 September. Sponsored by the NSW Department of State and Regional Development, the seminar will consist of short presentations by the keynote speakers from the conference followed by a panel discussion open to the audience at the Armidale campus and, via videoconference, to audiences at the UNE Tamworth Centre and UNE Access Centres in Boggabilla, Coonabarabran, Gunnedah, Inverell, Moree, Narrabri, Quirindi and Tenterfield. Professor Moses said the seminar was “a wonderful idea for sharing expertise”. (The photograph displayed here shows Professor Audretsch, at left, and Professor Hutchinson at the conference.)

The Armidale Dumaresq Mayor, Councillor Peter Ducat, in welcoming the conference delegates to Armidale, spoke about his own interest, as a businessman, in the conference, and the interest of the council as a whole in facilitating the establishment of new businesses.

The President of SEAANZ, Michael Schaper, said that, although the organisation’s annual conference was being held in Armidale for the first time, UNE had been “pivotal to its foundation” in 1987. Mr Schaper pointed out that the former UNE Professor, Geoff Meredith, who had been the driving force behind its foundation, was in the audience as a delegate to this year’s conference.


Media contact: Professor Patrick Hutchinson, New England Business School, UNE (02) 6773 3902 or Jim Scanlan, Public Relations, UNE (02) 6773 3049.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at September 27, 2005 11:34 AM