Google Australia’s Managing Director, Nick Leeder, has outlined how Australia can flourish in the digital future, saying that the country needs technologically innovative companies to supercharge its presence in the digital world.

Speaking at a recent RMIT University Business Lecture Series event, Mr Leeder said that Australia needed to create a "critical mass" of tech-savvy companies.

"We need to find out how universities can better connect with the start-up community and companies like Google," he said.

"Creating better links between these three groups will start to create some mass."

He said greater digital innovation would help lift productivity and global competitiveness.

"We look to Silicon Valley as an incredible creator of wealth in the United States," he said.

"It creates an enormous pool of capability for the whole economy to draw upon.

"It creates the engineers and the technicians who can help businesses navigate these changes really well."

Mr Leeder explained that while the start-up community in Australia lacked critical mass, the quality of engineers was very strong.

"With Google we can choose where we put our offices and our engineering centres," he said.

"The Australian engineering centre is one of the largest that we have globally and that's because of the quality of the engineers we can find in this country."