The culmination of months of hard work by the UP team and the fulfilment of a long held personal ambition of mine will happen on Friday afternoon 7th Nov when we open the inaugural Unlimited Potential – Wellington to the World (W2W) event.
If ever there was a time when we needed to grow our services exports it’s now. Trade deficits are worsening and commodity prices are dropping along with the value of our currency. On the other hand, with economies contracting, businesses are looking to technology to help drive efficiencies. That represents a huge opportunity for our small technology service providers who can react quickly and now price more competitively in foreign markets.
Furthermore, lean businesses with compelling and scalable value propositions will survive tough economic times and thrive when the next upswing arrives. So at Unlimited Potential we decided to help by creating an event that would both promote technology commercialisation and assist a bunch of Wellington companies to take their products to the world.
With the aid of our multi-talented MC, technology blogger, entrepreneur and Unlimited magazine columnist Ben Kepes, the free two-part event kicks off with an afternoon tea at 3.45pm followed by several short presentations by ICT researchers from Victoria University. Topics covered include network security, robotics and next-gen search engines. Sponsored by VicLink, these speakers are looking to engage with potential business partners and collaborators from downtown to begin moving towards commercialisation with aspects of their research.
The second part of the show begins with drinks and networking from 5.15pm and involves already fully commercial ventures that are preparing to scale up and go global. We’ve deliberately chosen businesses with high growth potential, but that are not well known (yet). We’ll be video filming all the presentations and promoting these across KEA’s huge global network as well as New Zealand Trade and Enterprise’s offshore trade offices. It’s a huge opportunity and one that we hope to repeat on an annual basis – with your support. The presentations will be followed by drinks and networking.
We already know that Wellington has a reputation for producing great digital technology businesses and we want to keep promoting the city through this event. Even better still, we think W2W could eventually become a nationwide event, based in Wellington but promoting the best and brightest of NZ technology innovation in a “Kiwi Demo” style format.
The full programme for W2W can be found here
You need to register for the event here.