Wellington
The fact we produce a high proportion of business graduates, most only studying general skills,and relatively few technical graduates is one reason for our country's poor innovation performanceaccording to IPENZ .
The Institution of Professional Engineers of NZ's recent document and thought piece
We also need to make the NZ economy more 'sticky' to high technology companies so they remainhere the document says.
"We lack international business expertise, technically-literate management expertise andcommercially-literate technical expertise in our private sector," it says.
"The new tiger economies have lifted their economic performance by flooding their economies withtechnical graduates, and then at their mid-career converting many of the more able to them to becomemanagers of high technology businesses. A diverse management stock including a proportion whoseorigins were in technical roles, enriches companies."
IPENZ contends that too many of our top brains end up in the spending economy such as health,law, accountancy, banking, infrastructural engineering, and environmental science, and too few inthe earning economy. In effect the tradeable sector or earning industries, are making do with toolittle of our top talent.
It suggests that a boost in government spending ($500 million) firstly be targeted at modifiedoutputs for universities (and polytechs) and CRIs, with less emphasis on the output of scientificpapers, and more emphasis on engagement with the private sector. The second part of IPENZ's proposalis to provide direct co-funding for the early years employment of R&D workers in new positionsin industry.
The outcomes of these policy proposals would be:
•Academics being strongly incentivised to go out into industry, build strategic partnershipswith companies, and to transfer skilled people to the company at the end of the project. Clusteringwould be enhanced. The net change would rebalance the engineering schools, ICT faculties and evenparts of science faculties to be industry-focused, rather than predominantly focused on academicoutputs
•Incentivises small private businesses to take on R&D staff, thereby having R&Dexpertise in-house. It lowers the barrier of high initial cost to get a research worker established.This in turn encourages R&D to become part of a business as usual occurrence, thus leading toongoing R&D and opportunities being developed for businesses.
These proposals would make it less likely that our brightest graduates drifting offshore to lookfor jobs associated with cutting edge technologies and innovation. It would also attract ourcountry's brightest graduates into R&D.
The IPENZ document mirrors and reinforces recent NZ Institute discussion papers. Many of theseideas are worthy of more debate, particularly among (obviously) policy-makers.
As the new Ministry of Science and Innovation gets its feet under the table, presumably with themandate that the country can't carry on with business as usual, let's hope these ideas get a decentairing.