Instead of looking at perceived gaps in New Zealand's innovation ecosystem our engineeringprofessional body's asked what the country could do with an extra $500 million.
The
Institute of Professional Engineers New Zealand
has 'visualised success' in its latest thought piece and document,
"We need to get to a disruptive level of R&D, we need to get the private sector working muchbetter," says Andrew Cleland, IPENZ chief executive.
While acknowledging changes to improve our productivity and innovation, including the regulatoryenvironment, public sector efficacy, the tax system and infrastructure, these changes alone areinsufficient he says.
Two poorly recognised issues need to be addressed:
•The need to boost expertise in our private sector to develop, adapt and adopt newtechnologies (innovation expertise)
•The need to make the NZ economy more 'sticky' to hightechnology companies so they remain here
Cleland says a transfer of innovation expertise from the government R&D sector and anincrease in connectivity would be the best place to put (more) government investment money.
One suggested initiative is a co-fund approach for SME development of new R&D jobs.
"This would encourage companies to grow their innovative capability, and overcome the'chunkiness' problem for SMEs," he says. Chunkiness in this case is the comparatively large expensethat having an R&D expert onboard represents for many smaller companies.
Cleland says the current university and CRI systems that incentivises them to retain staff andreward the publishing of research papers needs to be changed. Instead, such bodies should berewarded for getting its personnel into the private sector he says.
The education system, and technically-savvy people, need to realise that there is also a careerpath for clever people to become leaders, shareholders and owners in high-tech companies saysCleland, rather than remaining in a laboratory.
Universities and CRIs would need to be 'encouraged' [sticK's quotation marks] to get out andactively chase private sector business owners to carry out more R&D he says.
Business owners are simply too busy running their operations to have time to approach tertiaryinstitutions - therefore the university or CRI has to hunt down the private sector people interestedin R&D and innovation Cleland says.
Cleland says the government has been made aware of, and were part of, discussions behind theIPENZ document.
"Our thoughts are given freely," he says. "We're trying to stimulate discourse, and hope theideas are taken seriously and considered. What it mainly highlights is that we need to do somethingdifferent."