Blink And You’ll Miss The Chance — Tech Companies In CHCH Have Some Homework To Do
In December ChristchurchNZ was highlighting that we had jumped massively in the startup world and had “jumped an astounding 168 places in Startup Blink’s 2022 Global Startup Ecosystem Index to make the world’s top 250 cities”. That’s a massive achievement and a great metric to be proud of, spawning an opinion article in the NZ Herald from Ali Adams CEO of ChristchurchNZ.
But what was the cause of the massive jump and how can we back it up with another leap this year? It’s hard to see what caused the massive jump in rankings without having access to their scoring matrix, unfortunately I don’t think it is the startup ecosystem that has caused it, I suspect it may have been to do with the recent acquisition of Sequent that has caused the spike.
We have some great startups in Christchurch and it’s awesome to see Ethique, VXT & EVNEX highlighted as notable startups on the website. But unfortunately, we are under-represented on this startup ecosystem map as you can see below.
When you dive deeper into the Startup Blink map it clearly shows Christchurch having a very low count of startups compared to other places with only 14 listed for Christchurch, compared to Wellington with 34, Auckland with 138 & Sydney with 778. Meaning whatever scoring system that they used may be a one-off and we have some work ahead of us if we want to improve our position by year's end.
On their ecosystem they don’t list any of the great accelerators like Ministry of Awesome, ThincLab or HTK Group so I don’t think any of their great efforts could have been accounted for in the ranking system. Also, there are zero co-working spaces listed on the map and we have some really great co-working spaces that should be accounted for in our ranking system.
So come on Christchurch it’s time to get:
- all our startups on the map
- all our co-working spaces on the map
- all our accelerators on the map
- all our tertiary educators here
- any other company that is on the drop-down list below
If we want to grow Christchurch to be a world leader for startups and tech we need to work together. Please click this link — it will take you less than 3 minutes to add your company https://startupblink.com/register
