Under the government's flagship National Innovation and Science Agenda, unveiled in December, the Coalition committed $1.1 billion towards helping Australia transition away from the mining boom.

But experts say the measures, as well as two new policies outlined in the budget, fail to go far enough to help drive sustainable growth.

"It is difficult to find any further progress on the ideas boom," Professor Roy Green, dean of the University of Technology Sydney's Business School, said.

"We started spectacularly last year with a very big change in the government's narrative and the hope was the narrative was to gain further momentum from this budget."

"But it seems to be a very marginal element in the budget, most of which simply replicates the [National Innovation and Science Agenda]."

The budget outlined two new measures to drive innovation — a review by the CSIRO's data innovation group Data61 into blockchain technology, and a marketing campaign worth $200,000 to sell Australian financial technology capability in the region.

Policies already announced under the NISA package included a $200 million CSIRO Innovation Fund to support investment in start-ups, and reforms to employee share schemes and crowd-sourced equity funding.

There are also significant tax breaks for start-up investors, designed to create a culture of risk-taking similar to that in Silicon Valley or Singapore.

Professor Green said the package was not enough to lead to job creation or help the economy as a whole.

"If this budget and the government's narrative is about transitioning to a post-mining economy, then we need much more targeted measures for industry transformation than just tax cuts," he said.

"It would have to include measures that boost R&D performance, and our non-tech performance."

"If start-ups start up and go nowhere, it's not going to add value in the long term."

The government has struggled to convince policy analysts that its ideas boom will lead to economic growth.

In February a poll by the Economic Society of Australia and Monash University Business School showed almost half of economists surveyed believed tax breaks for start-up investors would be inefficient at best, and at worst be exploited as a tax loophole for wealthy investors.

Professor Beth Webster, director of the Centre for Transformative Innovation at Swinburn University of Technology, said the innovation measures outlined so far were more about helping companies make money than growing the economy as a whole.

"There is not sufficient evidence to say start-ups are going to give a big lift to the Australian economy," she said.

"Everyone looks to Israel as a start-up nation. But if you go to Israel, the economists there talk about whether all of these start-ups have actually had an impact on the economy."

"There's not actually overwhelming evidence to show that it's made the economy richer, rather than just some people richer."

Alex McCauley, head of lobby group StartupAUS, said there was little in the budget to advance the government's support for innovation.

"From that perspective, it is a disappointment," he said.

But he defended the government's focus on tax cuts, which the group says are some of the most generous in the world.

"What we want is for Australia to be producing the big tech companies, and where they come from is small tech companies," he said.

The Victorian government criticised the federal government for falling short on its "innovation" promise after rejecting a proposal to allocate $60 million in the budget for a new biomedical engineering centre in Melbourne.

The centre is intended as a research and education hub that the state government says will generate thousands of jobs.

"Victorians want Malcolm Turnbull to stop talking about innovation and actually start investing in it," Health Minister Jill Hennessy said.

David Jackson, board member of venture capitalist group Sydney Angels and chief executive of small business lender FundX, said the budget could have gone further to help business.

"We're hearing a lot of rhetoric regarding innovation and entrepreneurship from the government, however on an international scale we are still significantly lagging," he said.