The Regional Innovation Systems in the City of Casey: Perspective Evaluation

The City of Casey in Victoria is the third most rapidly growing region of Australia in terms of population expansion and housing development. Infrastructure and services development do not appear to be growing at the same pace. Job leakages into the surrounding regions are high being around 80%. The city of Casey is unable to provide education, medical, social and employment opportunities to the current residents. From our review it appears that there is a poor Regional Innovation System (RIS) development in the Casey region. A measure of RIS is the development of industry and services sector clusters. This is extremely poor to the point of non-existence in this region. Learning from the experience of successful RISs such as Emilia-Romanga, Tuscany and others with a large number of small and medium enterprises it is clear that the government needs the political will to encourage and foster cluster formation, provide structural and business development support, provide infrastructure and financial services to allow the region to prosper and come forward. The City of Casey is a part of metropolitan Melbourne. About 45 minutes east of Melbourne on a direct freeway, Casey is ideally suited for the development of successful clusters and regional innovation given the success of government driven initiatives elsewhere in the world. The local and the state governments have several cluster development initiatives which are described in the context of Casey's RIS. This study is contributing to the new developing literature in weak innovation systems and what can be done to improve them.