Cicada Innovations CEO Says Australia Poised to Build Globally Competitive Deep-Tech Champions

Australia is well positioned to produce globally competitive deep-tech companies—and to use them to strengthen national capability in key industries—according to the chief executive of one of the country’s most prominent startup and scaleup incubators.

Liza Noonan, CEO of Sydney-based Cicada Innovations, argues that Australia already has many of the foundational advantages required for deep technology to flourish. In her view, the country’s mix of abundant natural resources, a vast and varied landscape, geographic closeness to Asian markets, and a highly developed clinical trials sector creates conditions that can support breakthrough innovation.

Those assets, Noonan says, make Australia an “attractive proposition” for deep-tech ventures—businesses that typically rely on advanced science and engineering and often need longer development timelines and greater capital than standard software startups. She contends that the nation is capable of producing world-leading technologies, but emphasizes that the challenge is not invention so much as execution at scale.

The central task, she suggests, is turning promising science-based companies into scaled enterprises that can operate across industries and compete internationally. Achieving that kind of growth would allow Australia to better address domestic needs with homegrown technologies, rather than relying on external suppliers and overseas intellectual property.

Noonan’s comments place the spotlight on “sovereign capabilities”—the ability for a country to maintain control over critical technologies and industrial capacity. Deep tech, spanning areas such as advanced manufacturing, medical technology, and other research-intensive fields, is increasingly seen as integral to national resilience. In that context, building and scaling local innovators is not simply a matter of economic opportunity, but also of strategic importance.

Cicada Innovations, based in Sydney, works with startups and scaling firms aiming to commercialize complex technologies. Noonan’s assessment suggests that while Australia’s raw ingredients for deep-tech success are strong, realizing that potential depends on building companies that can expand beyond early-stage experimentation into sustained production, deployment, and export.

In other words, Australia, in Noonan’s view, does not lack ideas—or even the enabling environment to generate them. The question is whether it can consistently convert those ideas into large, durable businesses that solve national problems and win global customers.

Why it matters

Deep-tech companies often underpin critical infrastructure in health, industry, and resource management, affecting everything from clinical care to supply-chain security. If Australia can scale more of these ventures, it could reduce dependence on imported technologies and capture more economic value from local research. The next test will be whether policy, investment, and commercialization pathways can reliably support long development cycles and help startups grow into globally competitive firms.