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• Paper 6: ICT
• Growth Target

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• ICT Taskforce

11. The overarching recommendation of the taskforce report is that key stakeholders in the ICT sector should adopt a target of growing a further 100 ICT companies through the annual sales level of $100 million per company and develop and implement coherent plans to achieve this goal over the next ten years. This goal can also be expressed as lifting the contribution of the ICT sector to GDP from its current rate of 4.3% to 10% by 2012. Achieving this goal will require an annual growth rate in the ICT sector of 13% per annum (assuming a 3% growth rate overall). A significant proportion of this growth would have to come from exports, although the ability of firms such as Telecom, EDS and IBM to increase sales in the local market will also be important.

12. The growth target is aspirational and should be viewed as an entrepreneurially driven endeavour. The taskforce is clearly encouraged by the growth in the ICT sector over the last eight years, with exports of hardware, software and services now worth a billion dollars annually. The taskforce is not asking the Government to achieve the target - it is instead asking the Government to enrol in and support its entrepreneurial vision. Such vision will be required - and should be encouraged - if the goal of returning to the top half of the OECD is to be achieved.

13. Risks include the ability of New Zealand institutions to supply sufficient appropriately skilled labour, the current lack of people with the necessary international marketing and sales experience and the availability of sufficient capital to drive accelerated growth over ten years.

Taskforce Recommendations

14. The taskforce recommendations are designed to address the risks and are divided into six key objectives:

• grow New Zealand ICT businesses that are globally competitive;
• elevate the leadership capabilities of New Zealand ICT entrepreneurs to that of world-class entrepreneurial chief executive officers;
• grow, sustain and retain a highly skilled ICT workforce;
• build an entrepreneurial ICT culture that supports and celebrates business success;
• government contribute to ICT growth by improving the regulatory environment, its purchasing polices and performance in research and development, so that ICT businesses can flourish; and
• implementation proposals including an industry-led implementation body and improved statistics to measure progress.