Such is the shortage, that a recent would-be returning ex-pat Kiwi, who knew how to program, put out a general inquiry through WellRailed if anyone in Wellington or wider NZ would be interested in meeting once he got here.

Apparently he immediately had 26 replies, and half a dozen offers of employment, sight unseen, with no interview whatsoever.

So; it would seem there’s a definite shortage of people who understand and can manipulate the workings of computers, mobile devices and apps.

It is this developer (another name for coder and programmer) shortage that’s driven Enspiral (a digital collective cum incubator cum clever people autonomously working together) to offer a type of ‘coding for dummies’ course, specifically around Ruby programming. (sticK’s had a couple of stories on Enspiral’s different type of business model before; see here and here.)

It is called Code Yoga, and its intent is to expose people who have never coded before to what it is about, and, reasonably quickly, help them get a level where could be employed at a junior coding level. From there – well, the world’s your oyster if that’s your bent.

This is very much an Enspiral kinda thing to do.

The collective’s co-creator, Joshua Vial, and the rest of its current eco-system of 105 people based mainly in Wellington but linked to Hong Kong, Berlin, New York and Phnom Penh, share a philosophy of helping people to help themselves.

It is part of the social enterprise model that drives most of the 12 companies that reside (the wrong word but it will have to do) under its umbrella.

Enspiral itself is programmer short-handed at times, so at the very least it is feeding its own needs.

But, in identifying a patently obvious shortage, and doing something about it in a ‘just do it, just learn it’ manner, Enspiral’s demonstrating an attitude that’s bigger than itself.

According to Vial, many of the dozen or so people who have done the course since it kicked off in recently (advertised through the interesting ‘teaching/learning’ platform Chalkle), have graduated to real, paying jobs in IT.

These include writers, teachers, other types of professionals, as well as students.

As a crash course compared to university or polytech based one to three year courses, it is obviously quite different.

However, as a way of introducing newbies to the hidden world of code, and whether it is a gig they’d like to have a go at for a while, these Enspiral guys deserve some credit.

Heck, some of them might even enjoy it as a challenge!

P.S. Enspiral’s kicking off a dev boot camp in the next month or two too – keep an eye out if you’d like to be part of t

Or, perhaps it is just me that is completely underwhelmed by the announcement of 10 research areas that can comfortably be binned as business as usual.

Though, pity the team tasked with coming up with an overview of the NSC considering there were only 200 entries from greater New Zealand on where and what we should research.

Right from the get-go the challenge lacked direction, had a sort of what is it all about non-rationale.

As chairman of the NSC, the prime minister’s chief science adviser Sir Peter Gluckman is obliged to put a positive spin on the challenge.

As he commented recently:

“The intent is to invigorate the science system, allowing it to become more collaborative and strategic in its approach.”

As the Tui billboards say,

‘Yeh, right’

But firstly, a reminder of the challenges selected.

• Aging well – harnessing science to sustain health and wellbeing into the later years of life
• A better start – improving the potential of young New Zealanders to have a healthy and successful life
• Healthier lives – research to reduce the burden of major New Zealand health problems
• High value nutrition – developing high value foods with validated health benefits
• New Zealand’s biological heritage – protecting and managing our biodiversity, improving our biosecurity, and enhancing our resilience to harmful organisms
• Our land and water – Research to enhance primary sector production and productivity while maintaining and improving our land and water quality for future generations
• Life in a changing ocean – understanding how we can exploit our marine resources within environmental and biological constraints
• The deep south – understanding the role of the Antarctic and the Southern Ocean in determining our climate and our future environment
• Science for technological innovation – enhancing the capacity of New Zealand to use physical and engineering sciences for economic growth
• Resilience to nature’s challenges – research into enhancing our resilience to natural disasters

They’re all worthy, but.

The trouble is, they’re just another ad-hoc add-on to a science and innovation system that has no clear idea of what we, NZ Inc, are trying to do, or of what particular piece(s) of a very large pie we should/could concentrate on.

At the same time (and I appreciate this is dirty-type talk) – these challenges don’t address where and how are we going to make more money for our country by clever use of R&D, and taking such new products and services to market?

There’s no connectedness between science and the economic health of our country. It means there a lack of relationships and countrywide partnering linking everything.

The NSC will achieve nothing. The public will have no more engagement with science, business is none the wiser, scientists will simply keep on keeping on.

Amongst comment, from my point of view, the best came from Prof Shaun Hendy – who was courageous enough to call a whole lot of nothing exactly that. Shaun’s a professor at Victoria University’s School of Chemical and Physical Sciences, as well as deputy director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology. He also a regular answer-provider on National Radio’s evening show. Original story is here.

“Of the 10 science challenges selected, only one really addresses one of the key economic challenges our country faces: namely the over-dependence of our economy on the primary sector,” he said.

“Our government invests far less in physical sciences and engineering than those of other small advanced economies, leaving our economy perilously exposed to volatile commodity markets.”

Having one of the challenges “simply aimed at making better use of physical science and engineering research is disappointing, given that we have just created a new organisation, Callaghan Innovation, to do exactly this”, Prof Hendy said.

Exactly.

We have MBIE, Callaghan Innovation, the Marsden Fund, these challenges – but no clear idea of what we’re doing.

Certainly is business as usual.

But (apparently), there’s only three companies around the world have pulled off the feat – including Auckland-based LiveLink Connect.

The three-year old six-person entity (you can hardly call it a start-up now), was incubated through The Icehouse and has had two angel funding rounds for a total of about $450,000 invested.

Its founder and managing director Jason Roberts (disclaimer….an old mate of mine) had been in sales and marketing roles for a number of years and more often than not found email a terrible sales tool.

“It was hard to share information between distributors, retailers and customers, and, if as a salesman you sent an email, you had no idea if it was opened,” says Roberts.

“As a salesman, you want to ensure your email dresses to impress and ensure the ability to perfectly time your follow up call, so that was one of the things we set out to do.”

Roberts et al have created what they call ‘everything email’, which as well as being robust technology is also able to work with other email products LLC has on a collegial basis.

For example, company logos are rendered properly no matter what type of device the email is read on (and estimates now are that 50% are done so on a mobile device), whether it has been opened, or even if a disclosure document has been read.

The latter ability is especially important for those selling financial services such as insurance or broking other products – and having an electronic proof of a disclosure having been opened is becoming an increasingly important sales tool for LLC.

“What we’ve created, and continually improving is technologically complex, though, being cloud-based means it has to be simple, easy, secure and cheap,” he says.

“The information and data we can provide back to our clients about what actions have occurred as a result of the email makes its an invaluable marketing and sales tool – exactly what we set out to achieve.”

Roberts says LLC’s next major development is a sophisticated and integrated ‘statement stopper’. That is, to halt the sending of letter-based bills such as electricity, and instead has them sent by email.

LLC’s tracking ability indicates whether a customer hasn’t opened a company’s email, and a paper statement can then be automatically sent by snail-mail.

At that stage, Roberts expects to feature on the radar of a larger company looking to expand its offering, “so in five years or less we’re definitely looking to be acquired.”

Given that LLC is export-expanding, and is now trialing its technology with CMC, a division of giant Indian company Tata, that five year window may be short.

Not too bad for a sales tool that seems a sitter but obviously is a difficult one to pull off.

There’s particular issues which need resolving when using the power of the crowd; along with the hope that someone has a usable answer.

Victoria (University) Business School in Wellington has, in the academic way that adheres to such publications’ rules, identified many of the pros and cons of open innovation and crowd sourcing in a hot-off-the-press paper recently published in ‘Technology Innovation Management Review’, see here.

Sally Davenport, Stephen Cummings, Urs Daellenbach and Charles Campbell have turned open innovation and crowd sourcing on its head with their paper and exploration; ‘Problemsourcing: Local Open Innovation for R&D Organizations’.

They’ve coined the term ‘problemsourcing’ – and given the rigour with which peer review is maintained – you have to presume they’re first.

“Problemsourcing is akin to crowdsourcing in reverse in that the open call initiator, not the crowd, holds the problem-solving capabilities, and the crowd-members offer not solutions but promising problems that would create substantial value if solved.”

The paper uses (the late) Industrial Research Ltd’s 2009 initiative ‘What’s Your Problem New Zealand’ as the model around which its authors explore problemsolving as a new open innovation practice – and in particular how the WYPNZ? competition for $1 million of research spending addresses eight key issues.
• Project delays
• Solution quality
• Ambiguous liability
• Temporary relationship
• Professional challenge
• Identity clash
• Exploitation and reputation effects
• Losers disenfranchised

The writers conclude that the success of WYPNZ? at this stage is measured primarily by the range of high-quality problems that were proposed as well as the sheer number of companies (in a small country) that, by submitting problems, indicated an interest in participating in such a process.

They point out: “With crowdsourcing, innovative activity is distributed somewhere in the crowd, but with problemsourcing, it remains firmly within the boundaries of the R&D organization, which we propose mitigates many of the risks and pitfalls associated with typical crowdsourcing initiatives.”

IRL ensured that its selected challenge had a fit with its own science and research resources, could make a difference to the country (and its economic health) and had a degree of sexiness (sticK, not Victoria Business School’s terminology) that would resonate with the general public and business alike. Resene Paints, and its wish to create a sustainable-base paint was the ultimate winner.

As Callaghan Innovation comes into being (and taking note of BusinessDesk journalist Pattrick Smellie’s recent article suggesting we give CI a chance to find its feet) the Davenport et al paper would be good reading for its people.

WYPNZ? was one of a number of IRL initiatives that lifted science and research beyond the white lab coat concept.

It spurred some companies which had never thought of R&D as a part of their business, to reconsider. It also brought (as the paper points out) many, many more partnering research opportunities IRL’s way.

WYPNZ? also dovetailed strongly, as you’d expect being its instigator, with IRL’s strengths.

But most of all it was fun.

And that’s an ‘f’ word we should allow ourselves, along with another one – failure.

(sticK had a blog on an earlier version of Unified Inbox here.)

For a brief period while in Shanghai, he (relatively unintentionally) went back in time 25 years or so, where he didn’t have a mobile phone or internet connection. In this he found quite a freedom.

Toby’s expressed many of the disconcerting pressures and issues that some of us have about always being connected, always feeling like you’re having to check in to see who has been checking in. I see some of the same in my own children and their relationship with Facebook, (I’m probably one of its worst users).

It is not difficult to see why some researchers believe that modern children are having their brains rewired differently to how older generations did – a result of all this immediate connectivity and ability to find an answer to any question straight away.

I thoroughly recommend a read of Toby’s blog. He articulates some excellent reasons for disconnecting for a little bit at least – not the least of which can be summarised as ‘sanity’.

There’s always a danger in considering the past to have been slightly more rosy-coloured than today, but he raises some good points in his discussion.

His blog also points to other examples of people reverting, at least temporarily, to a non-connected lifestyle.

I’m sure that in the not too distant future, doctors and others will thoroughly recommend, if not almost force, all of us to have a break from always being on. In the meantime, thanks Toby for highlighting the Power of Un-Location.

The fullhouse (dozens on the waiting list), heard how the nine IT-oriented businesses are going, how they’ve changed and pivoted (or spivoted as Questo described their 360° return to where they began) and how they’re achieving product-market fit.

All are using the lean startup methodology and being heavily mentored in the expectation that many will attract new and additional investment at a formal pitch session Demo Day at Te Papa on May 15.

The nine startups, whittled down from an original 87 applications, have received up to $18,000 for the three month internship cum building platform. LL’s organisers, Dave Moskovitz, Creative HQ and many others describe it as being a means to build a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem across New Zealand, and have modified America’s TechStars model for Kiwi sensibilities.

Lighntning Lab is sponsored by CreativeHQ, MBIE, ninetwenty recruitment, The Wellington Company, Weta Digital, FX Netowrks, TradeMe and CityLink.

It is all part of, in sticK’s opinion, a maturing and reality check on the difficult feat of turning an idea into a product or service that someone will buy. That, or creating a fast-failure so an entrepreneur can get on with another project that does have market potential.

The three month intensive is divided into thirds (with participants currently halfway through):

· First month –validation & mentor bombardment (asking questions, testing hypotheses)
· Second month – build a structure
· Third month – prepare for investment….and beyond

One interesting feature, is a weekly group evaluation of everyone’s progress and ranking (which varies). This ever-changing ranking graphically shows how well teams are considered to be going.

For the record, the presentations and brief explanation of the startups are: (The companies and original market intent can be found here.

A point to note is the change in description of what the startups consider to be their market, and/or problem they’re solving).

Questo! – platform to connect parents and their children and share photos (in particular)

KidsGoMobile – a means to make children’s smartphone use safer by enabling parents to have an overview of who they’re connecting

withPromoki – a collaborative media project to use crowdsourcing to make and tell stories (particularly around brands)

Teamisto – social media platform for grass root sports teams, allowing them to interact with and provide value to local businesses that may wish to be sponsors

Expander – tracking and analytics platform to protect brands, first aimed at NZ food and beverage productsMyBuy – mobile marketing platform particularly aimed at SME’s

Publons – building a way for academics to publish articles without having to use a journal (publication)

WIP – cloud-based collaboration tool for film-making and editing

LearnCOACH – platform to allow one-on-one, conversational english tuition to non-english students

As programme director Dan Khan says, “the lean startup methodology is a set of very commonsense techniques.”

“What is also really important is the importance of a vision – defined in a way that allows a company, when pivoting, to remain within that vision,” he says.

To have such a vision, a company needs a good idea of what problem it is trying to solve, and that there’s a big enough pain point to provide a product that customers will love.

Roll on (and even role on) May 15 – the proof of the (investment) pudding for Lightning Labs first cohort of graduates!

At the same time, the NZ Inc desire to add value to our raw commodities such as trees is almost tiresome through over-use.

So, it is a pleasure to be able to highlight a company and person doing something different and in their case, making a better pine pole.

Now TTT Products (and no, I’d never heard of them either until going through a recent exercise to maximise the return from a 20 year old four hectare block of pines that I’m involved with) isn’t a small firm. Its North Island headquarters at Tuakau covers 20ha, specialising in creating pine poles of many different sorts.

It may even seem to be a coals to Newcastle scenario, but TTT exports a fair number of these poles all around the Pacific and even to Europe and North America. This is partly because only pinus radiate (and Southern Yellow Pine) can take up the anti-insect, anti-corrosion chemical preservatives that then guarantee a longevity when buried in the ground.

However, the other clever product from TTT, partly ‘inspired’ by the recent Christchurch earthquakes, is what is called a MultiPole (and the basic focus of this blog)

It is a pole that’s actually a tube – TTT managing director John Reelick having perfected (and is keeping secret) a means to drill a long 50 – 150mm diameter hole in a pole. The pole is no weaker, and indeed, because the preservative chemicals can also be applied from the inside out, even more protected against rotting when in the ground.

What MultiPoles allow is a range of tools and complementary products such as cement or grout, that can be deployed because of this hole/tube.

For example, a water jet can be used to help clear the way and push the pole into the ground.

There’s a swag of engineering proofs and performance criteria, and Reelick and his team have further refined the MultiPole over the past couple of years.

Equally, the company’s demonstrating the versatility and application of poles as a modern building material for (rebuilding) Christchurch. They’ve built five storey offices, and a 15 storey model has also been proven as viable for the Garden City.

Which, is quite a lot of value-add for commodity, and an example of taking a raw material and making it work better.

Fantastic stuff all round. Keep up the good work TTT!

P.S.

The MultiPole appears to be a perfect, exportable, value-add product beyond a commodity. I’m sure John Reedick and his team have ideas they would like funding to research and perfect.

Callaghan Innovation has the mandate to be proactive – go give these guys a hand up.

They already know their market, and have a special product with, as IT businesses like to call it, a secret sauce (how to make the holes).

In the scheme of things, a very good CI investment bet for a multiple (or multipole in this case) return.

A couple of years ago, sticK reported on BGI Developments’ winning the right to commercialise AgResearch’s new textile fabric dyeing process.

The beauty of this process is different dye colours don’t bleed into each other – the picture or pattern remains sharp and embedded in the fabric (unlike say printing on top of a T-shirt for example).

BGI (stands for Bloody Good Ideas) directors Robyn George-Neich and Brent Gregory have spent part of the past two years looking for the right company to take the technology to the global market.

They now reckon they’ve found this key partner, American company Global Merino, San Anselmo, California headquartered.

George-Neich says the licenced technology allows designers to use merino in creative ways never before possible. This includes being able to choose colours and designs just before entering the market. Such flexibility of production reduces both the manufacturing and retailer risk.

BGI has spent the past year on commercial trials at Global Merino’s Melbourne facility, taking the innovation to commercial production.

Meanwhile, Global Merino report that their buyers’ responses to the new way of creating garments and graphics is “overwhelmingly positive”.

So, today the laboratory bench, tomorrow (or a few days after!), the world.

What this demonstrates is the value of partnership.

AgResearch’s mandate and strengths (these days) is not necessarily in commercialisation. That’s where BGI have come to the party. BGI doesn’t have the market depth or width to take the innovation to the world – that’s where Global Merino distribution is crucial.

BGI’s looking for other sectors of the textile market where the new dyeing technology can be applied, and AgResearch is trialling applications on wool in it various forms.

As George-Neich says, each of the parties would not be able to achieve alone what they can by working together.

She expects products made using the technology to be on shelves in 2014.

As a fusion of high performance and improved merino wool technologies and just-in-time fashion, this go to market model has a lot going for it.

Partnering, the right partnering, pays.

Tom McFadden, a Californian and Stanford biology lecturer among other things, completed a Masters in Science Communication at Otago University last year.

Under a Fullbright Scholarship and the moniker ‘Rhymebsome’ he toured a number of NZ schools promoting science and science education. The original sticK story is here.

Part of his Otago study was to:
1. Test the efficacy or effectiveness of a music-based video (for science)
2. Authorship, and the question of whether it is better to watch or make your own hip-hop song

Obviously there was enough proof of the value of communicating science through rap that McFadden’s launched a small Kickstarter project to fund five professional music videos by Middle Schools in the San Francisco Bay area.

McFadden’s also obviously a pretty competent utiliser of social media, because he contacted sticK to promote what he’s up to.

So here’s a plug for his Battle RAp Histories of Epic Science (or Brahe’s Battles). Brahe was also a 16th century astronomer who helped prove that Aristotle’s view of unchanging heavens was wrong (as McFadden comments in his Kickstarter ‘sale’ video.

As he says on the Kickstarter page: “Combining science, history, music and video is a powerful educational experience. When students are given the tools to create a video that is viewed around the world, it can be life-changing.”

The song/videos made by the five schools will explore important moments in science history, and once complete will be available to students and teachers to enliven science education around the world.

All sounds good for the comparatively low requested sum of US$11,865, which needs to be pledged by Tuesday April 16 to be kickstarted.

Go hard Tom. Anything that helps demystify science and make it cool(er) deserves a good rap.

The business case put forward for and by Callaghan Innovation doesn’t use the term.

However, that’s what I interpret from the ‘Purpose of this document’ comment on its fourth page. (It follows an earlier sentence – Callaghan Innovation’s role does not currently exist in the New Zealand innovation system, and it is in effect a “start-up” organisation. [CI’s quotation marks]).

A bit of a pre-amble later, the document goes on to state:

Recognising these uncertainties, the draft business case submitted to Ministers on 13 December 2012 provided a development path with high levels of optionality and choices in the short to medium term, Callaghan Innovation’s investment in new tools and instruments being made in line with progress in this discovery process, and demonstrated results from pilot and service testing.

Now, perhaps unfairly, this can be interpreted as ‘we’re making it up as we go along’.

But, given:

1. The stealth-like, non-consultative manner an originally proposed Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) morphed into an all-singing, all-dancing CI
2. The fact that the CI establishment board chair (Sue Suckling) reported only and directly to minister-of-everything Steven Joyce, and
3. The lack of any (even loose) overseas model on which CI might be seen to be based,

Then there’s very little other conclusion that can be drawn.

I’m sure too that in his private-sector dealings, Steven Joyce would’ve never okayed the setting up of a new business venture before a business plan/case had been developed, but that’s what’s happening with the allocation of $166 million to be spent by CI over the next four years.

For all that, no one is going to be anti CI’s strapline ‘we accelerate commercialisation of New Zealand’s innovation’.

It is just that for all its 65 pages of business case proposal, we’re not that much wiser.

In fact, you have to wonder if recently announced chief executive Dr Mary Quin quite knows what she’s letting herself in for in taking up the new role.

In the absence of an actual nationally integrated science and innovation plan, the danger is that there’s no coherent sense of direction for our country.

At least (with a background as an engineer in materials science), Mary Quin isn’t an academic or professional manager.

Her recent experience in managing the 2,800 person USA support services company NANA Management Services, jointly owned by Alaska’s indigenous Inupiat people will no doubt serve her well in her new role.

From NZ Inc’s point of view, how and to what, she moulds an extremely amorphous Callaghan Innovation will be crucial for our country’s future.

Equally, managing relationships between CI’s chair, minister, stakeholders, researchers and the industry it is supposed to be serving will be no insignificant feat.

So, in welcoming you to the new role Dr Quin, you could do much worse that reviewing the ATI blueprints put forward by the now extinct Industrial Research Ltd.

At least those blueprints provide some idea of how to keep the CI plane in the air.

P.S. As a number of readers pointed out, Dr Michael J Kelly (ex-pat Kiwi now at Cambridge University, and former undergraduate colleague of the late Prof Sir Paul Callaghan) was interviewed by National Radio’s Kathryn Ryan on Nine to Noon on March 13. (CI chair Sue Suckling was also interviewed at the same time). One of Kelly’s main points is that there’s been no debate about how to structure the new organisation……and an inherent danger it becomes a mere broker of technical knowledge. The podcast can be found here.