Home featured Entrepreneur Featured Rebooting Australia Entrepreneur ‘We have to be bold and visionary’: Sally-Ann Williams Ann Wen October 9, 2020 Sally-Ann Williams is the CEO of Cicada Innovations, one of Australia’s leading deep tech incubators. Before joining Cicada, Sally-Ann was an Executive Program Manager at Google Australia for 12 years, driving Google’s entrepreneurship and startup engagement. We asked her about building resilience into Australian industries, cultural shifts in the way we innovate and emerging opportunities for businesses. What are the biggest challenges to the economy in the next few years? The biggest challenges to the economy over the next few years are in how we think about short-term and long-term recovery. In the short-term, there have been a lot of jobs displaced in travel, hospitality, tourism and retail. We can’t replace those jobs quickly. It’s not like we can turn on the travel spigot and we get flying and international tourism tomorrow. It’s just not going to happen. We need to think about what we’re going to do with all those people employed in those industries. In the long-term, opportunities for growth are going to be companies in deep tech that are solving the world’s biggest problems that haven’t disappeared because of the pandemic. Those companies have navigated the disruption in supply chains and they’re up and running and going full speed. They are desperately in need of people to join them. The challenge is bridging the gap between the people looking for opportunities and the skills they need