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Abstract

Over the past twenty years regional Australia has been the recipient of publicly funded
development and stimulus initiatives that are premised on assumptions about the
benefits that Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) can bring to a
region.
In Tasmania, the Australian Federal Government, through projects such as the
Intelligent Island Board, and the Launceston Business Development fund, has made
funding available to stimulate and encourage existing and new service providers to
develop innovative, new, high tech business applications, content, and infrastructure.
The objective of this research is to seek to gain an understanding of the perceptions,
motivations and actions of key people involved in establishing and administering these
publically funded ICT-related programs within Tasmania during the ten year period of
1996 to 2005.
The research methodology adopts an interpretivist epistemology and employs
qualitative analysis of a series of case studies of a single timeframe and related
programs; extracting data interpretively from a series of distinct interviews to derive a
series of effect-outcome models, and to gain a rich, deep interpretation of the intentions
of the key people involved in the process of establishing and administering these
programs. The research is exploratory, in that is based on raw data gained from
interviews with experts, and is theory building, because it seeks to build models of
relationships between the input factors and outputs of these research programs.
This research seeks to gain insight into the motivations and actions of these key
individuals as they implemented these programs in an Australian region, and to identify
the key factors that influenced decision making in these programs. The outcomes of this
research are relevant to both academics and practitioners interested in the process of
establishing and administering programs designed to stimulate and encourage ICTrelated
programs within an Australian regional economy.

Item Type:	Thesis - PhD
Authors/Creators:	Steer, DR
Keywords:	ICT-related initiatives, regional development, regional Australia, Tasmania
Additional Information:	Copyright the Author
Item Statistics:	View statistics for this item

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