Category Archives: Innovation

Developing a National Innovation Blueprint

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Corporates such as Intel and Cisco naturally want to promote us becoming more e-enabled because there’s a buck in it for them. But large multinationals are the natural born enemy of innovation, when you think about patent litigation costs and the detrimental effects of technology cartels. So I take it with a grain of salt when I hear that they have been filling conference halls on the topic of innovation. 

Notwithstanding my cynicism, the idea of a national innovation blueprint is a good one. Improving broadband infrastructure would help, but even if we could open an electronic super-highway to the world tomorrow, it’s not a panacea on its own. The primary choke on opening up the commercialisation of technology in New Zealand is lack of capital, not lack of ideas or lack of broadband. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that geographical proximity has a lot to do with investment decisions in the tech sector and for that we suffer. Hence the plea for high growth ventures to get offshore quickly.

Kiwis also hate divesting control and this is an additional barrier to growth. In fact we’ve already had this debate amongst the founders of our new venture as we begin to develop a product suite with global reach. The antidote is better education, more mentorship and good role modelling by other entrepreneurs who made the leap and succeeded without selling their souls. You can build a great business whilst still enjoying the lifestyle New Zealand has to offer.

Lastly, the vast majority of businesses will not receive any venture funding and may never grow beyond 5 or 10 employees. Yet, they pay tax regularly and put bread on the table of families. There is no certainly no shame in this. Perhaps one focus of a national innovation blueprint is that we need to better identify the really hot opportunities from amongst those hard-working small businesses and provide intensive practical support to build their value proposition and connect to the real world out there.

Maori Lexicon Spins Off Pod of Projects

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orcaEnglish has prevailed as both the accepted language of commerce and as a dominant language on the Internet.  But vast numbers of non-English speaking web users are demanding that the Internet become truly internationalised. That presents an opportunity for innovators able to span cultural divides with enabling technologies.

 My mate Dave Moskowitz always has a few interesting web based projects on the boil whenever we chat. So I was pleased to hear that the online Maori dictionary  for speakers of Te Reo has finally come to fruition after much hard work. The project also complements the excellent English-Maori online dictionary and language resource kete provided by Te Whanake.

Significantly, the collaborative open source tool set used to develop the lexicography is now to be deployed in other settings globally. Apart from projects involving translation of Hawaiian and Burmese Karen into English there is an intriguing local project involving research and preservation of Maori legal documents dating from the 19th Century. No doubt there will be a steady stream of enquiries once word circulates about this unique platform. The timing could not have been better, with the recent launch of the Maori version of Google.

As the Internet becomes more and more pervasive, there is a risk of imposing a dull monoculture on its users, particularly on indigenous peoples. And with the increasing affluence of non-English speaking regions such as the Middle East and Asia, the demand for translation tools and non-English web content must surely grow exponentially. Platforms developed in multicultural New Zealand are well positioned to take advantage of this growth and to encourage diversity on the Web.

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Entrepreneur’s Epilogue

It was a defining moment last week when ideegeo took up residency and became a foundation member at Altspace in downtown Wellington. Not a moment too soon. There has been a surge of progress, with our European partner company suddenly in a position to provide a steady stream of consultancy work. More importantly my CTO and his long-suffering (but very understanding) lady were getting heartily sick of us running the business out of their spare bedroom.

Altspace is a shared workspace for start-up companies and independent contractors, providing a communal office site complete with power, Internet and furnishings plus access to a kitchenette and toilets. Being centrally located it is handy for both casual day trippers and long term users who need a base for business. Altspace director Steven Heath will be on hand at the Geeks, Games and Gadgets ’08 expo to talk about the venue which he also hopes to make available to local I.T. user groups.

I will miss the view out the bedroom window however. On our first day of working together there was a pod of Orca playing in the shallows of the South Coast right below us. I took that as a good omen.

Global Market for Mobile Digital Innovation Booming

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Will the iPhone create a mobility revolution of Epic proportions?Reports of an emerging mobile advertising revenue market globally worth $US 150 billion by 2011 seem outlandish until you realise that the number of mobile social networking users is predicted to grow to almost a billion worldwide. Now with the launch of the much anticipated iPhone, user expectations of application mobility have been raised further, so providers of mobile applications will be searching for new and creative ways to drive revenue models to support those aspirations.

New Zealand undoubtedly has a chance to position itself as a global leader in mobile applications development. We already have pockets of creativity emerging. Zodal in Christchurch has arisen as both a market leader and industry evangelist on the mobile games and marketing front. In Wellington, Instinct Entertainment and Run the Red are successfully pursuing  their own particular niches and ideegeo is developing an Internet domain asset management tool that will have an iPhone interface. Open Cloud also grew up in the ICT Capital and, after a successful VC fund raising effort, is off to conquer the world with its acclaimed application server platform for provisioning Java based telco services. With mobile devices becoming even more ubiquitous than computers, it seems like we should be doing all we can to promote businesses like these as part of “transformative” efforts to improve the breadth of the economy.

On that note the next Unlimited Potential event is the annual “Geeks, Games and Gadgets” (GGG) showcase to be held in Wellington on 13th August. Because we are into promoting homegrown innovation, we’d love to have New Zealand mobile developers front up to demo and talk about their applications, especially games or edutainment. GGG ’08 will be bigger, brighter and marketed to a much wider audience than ever before. There will also be some surprise guests and lots of giveaways from our friends.

If you would like to share your clever games and gadgets, or position as an event sponsor, please get in touch as soon as possible. Post a reply on this blog article or use paul [at) up (dot] org [dot] nz.

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Events Epilogue

The roaring success of last week’s  Start-Up.co.nz / Silicon Welly launch event underlines my comments about how Unlimited Potential is rapidly emerging as the event manager of choice within the Wellington technology networking scene. Building social capital within knowledge sharing communities is something I am personally very passionate about because of the natural multiplier effects of networks that especially assist new or smaller ventures to grow.

The underlying reason for these effects is explained by research suggesting the importance of social networks in supporting entrepreneurship and innovation through facilitating capital flows, enhancing technology transfer and sourcing talent. In particular, networks assist with the settlement and retention of skilled migrants. At a time when New Zealand’s ICT businesses are constrained by a shortage of human resources, networks have a critical role to play. On that point….watch this space for further developments.

Speaking of social events, I was roped into helping run the bar at the aforementioned Unlimited Potential event last week and noticed that Epic Beer was the most popular drink in the house. We gave away several dozen within minutes. Thanks Epic for your support! Kind of appropriate when you consider the entrepreneurial story of Epic brewer Luke Nicholas and how he is developing the brand through Web 2.0 marketing techniques. We smell success in the wind.

Why ICT Underpins Innovation

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GITRA recent global report on information technology places New Zealand about the middle of the pack in terms of “network readiness”. But the index only accounts for part of the story about why the country is struggling to remain competitive through innovation.

The information technology report from INSEAD university and the World Economic Forum offers some very clear indications around what New Zealand has to achieve in order to boost innovation and raise competitiveness. The annual report ranks all countries in terms of ICT readiness by assessing a basket of factors that influence business, government and individuals. Quality of phone, broadband and server infrastructure, regulatory environment, quality of science education, R&D spend by firms and availability of venture capital are amongst the variables assessed to establish a “network readiness index” (NRI).

High network readiness alone does not guarantee success however. In fact highly competitive nations such as Finland, Israel and Taiwan rank slightly below New Zealand on the network readiness index. But if we consider a bunch of other factors that allude to innovative capacity, it paints a much different picture. Innovation factors (IF) include quality of scientific institutions, extent of university-industry collaboration, availability of scientists and engineers, number of patents issued per capita. These factors tell us whether or not a nation has the capacity to innovate through novel research, which is a far stronger value proposition than simple imitation. The fact that New Zealand ranks about the same as Zimbabwe is probably reason for some concern.

What we do know is that countries which rank highly on both counts, tend to be innovation powerhouses with rapidly improving GDP per capita. By this we mean nations such as Denmark, South Korea, India, Singapore and Malaysia. Unsurprisingly, all of these countries embarked some time ago on aggressive improvements to their ICT infrastructure. So exactly why does ICT appear to underpin innovation?

There are at least five good reasons why a sound ICT environment supports innovation processes:

  • Knowledge identification eg. market research, locating human resources, accessing science research, knowledge sharing platforms.
  • Developing creative capacity eg. computer aided design and 3D graphics.
  • Enhancing exploration eg. simulation and prototyping.
  • Shortening the design-test cycle eg. making failure inexpensive.
  • Improving capacity for commercialisation management eg. knowledge management, Web 2.0 e-marketing, virtual collaboration.
  • Empowering customer feedback into the design process.

The human genome project is a good example of a piece of innovation work that, a decade ago, could not have even been imagined anywhere in the world. Could such a project be done in New Zealand today? Although we now have a high speed research network and at least one homegrown firm offering suitable enabling software technology, it hasn’t happened because we are still struggling with a number of the innovation factors mentioned above. R&D spend is low, collaboration seems problematic rather the accepted norm and the education system is failing to inspire a new generation of scientists and engineers.

This shows that, as an enabler of innovation, we cannot consider ICT in isolation. There has been much debate over the need to rollout better broadband across New Zealand. But the economic case for substantial publicly funded investment in the project has yet to be properly made. Most people grasp that more and better ICT would be a good thing, but few are clear on exactly why. We need to benchmark ourselves more fully in order to better articulate the need.

X|Media|Lab Delivers Quality ConneXions

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xmlHeld last month at Te Papa, X|Media|Lab proved that we can all be global influencers for digital innovation. Not only that, but by utilising knowledge networks, we can leverage the creativity that already exists in our own back yard to help build successful global businesses. Some quick notes from the conference day:

The speaker session opened by addressing the concept of “ideation” – finding good ideas. Former Sony Entertainment president Chris Deering focussed the audience’s attention with the observation that online entertainment services would likely overtake revenues from TV and cable in the very near future. With MySpace (reportedly) approaching already 100 million sign-ups and phone handset sales ballooning he also predicted a future market for mobile communities in the vicinity of 400 to 800 million users by 2012. With numbers like that it was easy to see where the smart money was headed he said.

sachinIn a room full of game developers and creators of virtual worlds, those remarks really set the tone for the day. Continuing the theme, Virgin Comics and Animation CEO, Bangalore based Suresh Seetharaman, noted that in India alone there were 550 million under 20 year olds and that the mobile phone has become far more ubiquitous than the computer. He explained that his business was developing new creative streams, starting with fantasy comics because many of the largest grossing feature films have sprung out of comic book stories. Virgin Comics are creating a new pop culture by drawing on both mythology and modern media. A curious example of this is their Sachin Tindulkar super cricket hero storyline.

Local lad made good Richard MacManus prophesised on technology trends, later posting the presentation on his  highly rated Read Write Web blog. Moves towards the “intelligent web” were to the fore in his discussion as was the ongoing battle of Google versus Facebook. Keynote speaker Noah Falstein then spoke about the essentials of brainstorming and how to promote ideas instead of egos. Afterwards he went on National Radio and took part in a panel discussion about the future of online gaming.

Tom Duterme enthused about new venture development and the importance of establishing a good team behind the product. As Google’s talent scout for purchasing new businesses, I noticed he was much sought after during the intervals. Gao Li lead a team from the controversial but now profitable Suzhou Science Park (near Shanghai) and shared with us the staggering scale of China’s investment in research, science and technology. In her home province alone there is a $US 2 billion VC fund and some 3.8% of regional GDP is reinvested back into RS&T, putting New Zealand thoroughly to shame.

AlvinAlvin Wang Graylin expanded on the China story by mentioning that there are already nearly 600 million mobile phone users but with SMS being the predominant use, he cautioned that revenue per user remains low. In an effort to grow this market his company sets up mobile phone marketing services. He suggested that whilst carriers were keen on securing new revenue streams, this was limited by network capability for the time being.

Perhaps the speaker I enjoyed most was Hugh Mason from the U.K., a politely spoken and knowledgeable investor and entrepreneur in the creative sector. He had a very simple mantra for creating value with a winning start-up business team. “You need a finder, a minder and a grinder” on your team he said and try to have your product solve a problem that makes the world a better place. I took some comfort in the fact that we have formed our latest venture around just such a model.

I also enjoyed the networking session kindly hosted by Park Road Post the evening before but I found myself asking, as a “veteran” of the Wellington technology business networking scene, why was it the first time I had set foot in those hallowed halls. X|Media|Lab stands for cross-media connection. Why then do we hear so infrequently from our friends in Miramar? How about we run a local XMedia event each year and challenge film, software and graphics entrepreneurs to bounce new ideas around together.

According to Tim Berners-Lee, the new imperative for the Web is now creative connectivity. But as one of the XMediaLab speakers mentioned, “I do business with people that I like – but I first need to get to know them in person to like them”. Creativity and good ideas arise from the interstices between communities and hence it is very important to overlap from time to time. I feel that lately we have not been achieving this often enough. New Zealand Trade & Enterprise are to be congratulated for supporting this event and let’s hope there will be others in the future. In the meantime local networks like Unlimited Potential and ION will continue to add value by building social capital and sharing knowledge amongst the technology sector community.

Smallworlds Launches Virtual Playground

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swNew Zealand developer OutSmart go public with their virtual world offering this week. The Smallworlds team can be rightly proud of what they have achieved in terms of leveraging Kiwi creativity and generating a bankable global business opportunity. I was invited to be a beta tester on the site earlier this year and consequently got my son (7) and stepson (10) to try it out. The fact that they were so enthusiastic about it augurs well for the future.

Not only is Smallworlds safe and child-friendly, but it requires only an Adobe Flash plug-in to run within a browser. No expensive software downloads or monthly subscriptions. The site is hosted around the globe on Amazon’s EC2 cloud server array.

But Smallworlds will have wide appeal to young adults as well. You can personalise your avatar, set up and furnish your 3D virtual home and create a virtual pet that trots around after you adoringly. Then you can invite friends over to play pool or listen to music. And it’s all free to access. Have fun with it.

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Entrepreneur’s Epilogue

It was with much relief that we overcame the roadblocks that beset our baby start-up last week. Our internal wiki and email is in good health again and our funky web design expert is back home from the wilds of Bosnia (where Internet access is still a challenge to say the least!). So we now have a cool new logo and the makings of a website at last.

My CTO proudly showed me the server rack he acquired on TradeMe. It looks very impressive, all black and shiny with impressive LED displays. You know that you really do have an Internet business on your hands when your company owns a server rack. But can we spin some gold from all that silicon?

By the way, speaking of cost effective infrastructure for start-ups, Helen Baxter* links here to an interesting article on how the real cost of starting a business continues to fall as technology and connectivity improve. Food for thought.

* It was great to finally meet the effervescent Ms Baxter who was in town mentoring at X|Media|Lab last week. XML was the best event I’ve been to in years and I will devote some space to sharing about it very soon.

Start-Up B. Goode

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Paul Graham, from high profile Silicon Valley investor Y-Combinator, extols the virtue of “doing good” in this clip as he speaks to an audience of young entrepreneurs at the Start-Up School ’08 conference held recently at Stanford.

Graham is the kind of guy you sit up and pay attention to. His company currently funds and mentors over 50 start-ups, many of which are Web 2.0 ventures. He believes projects that do good gain a lot more traction when it comes to attracting customers and winning funding.

He cites Google which launched in 1999 as a hacker response to the lack of search functionality on the Internet. When Google began it had neither revenue nor customers, but it was those early years that saw the fastest appreciation in its share value.

By the way there is a whole bunch of stimulating material from the conference featured on Omnisio a very cool video presentation sharing site that is being backed by Y-Combinator and was co-founded by Ryan Junee. Seriously, I could happily spend hours surfing Omnisio which, unlike YouTube, actually hosts informative material worth watching.

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X|Media|Lab Event – Commercialising Ideas – Fri 30th May – Wellington

Don’t forget that the XMediaLab event hits town on Friday. If you are involved in anything remotely connected to mobile content, virtual worlds, Web 2.0 or digital media innovation in general, then you really need to be at this event. At $99 a head it has to be the best value outing of the year. Attracting global leaders in innovation to engage with NZ firms is one way we can overcome our remoteness. GeniusNet supports this event because we strongly believe that a lot of creativity and opportunity arises when you cross fertilise between different disciplines such as film, animation and software. See you there!

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Entrepreneur’s Epilogue

We hit our first speed bump this week. It was bound to happen. Our office server fell over for several days meaning we had no internal email and we lost our virtual whiteboard facility. With our people currently spread around Munich, Melbourne and Wellington, these tools are essential. So everything simply stopped happening. Very frustrating.

Then on Thursday night I made the mistake of venturing into the central city at 5pm. It was gridlock. As an organisational researcher I’m always interested in analogies between business theory and real life and it didn’t take me long to make the connection. In project management terms it’s called event chain methodology.

So I quickly realised I needed to find a sub-critical pathway to get my damn car out of the middle of the Willis Street / Manners Street intersection! The point is that we had encountered the exact same problem within the business. A critical feature had failed, leaving us with flow-on effects and time delays. Back to the drawing board to find a way around the problem. All good learning.

Silicon Welly to Host Technology Mentor Glitterati

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In an outstanding acknowledgement of Wellington’s status as the centre of New Zealand’s digital innovation universe the city has secured a global X|Media|Lab event to be held at Te Papa May 30th to June 1st. The theme is “Commercialising Ideas” and comprises a one day conference followed by an intensive weekend workshop involving technology venture mentors and successful entrepreneurs. You heard it here first!

The event is geared to helping technology firms develop their ideas to a point where they can increase the chances of receiving funding and getting to market successfully. Online gaming, mobile content, animation and anything Web 2.0 are focus areas for this event. The mentors include Chris Deering (former president Sony Entertainment), Marcelino Ford-Livene (GM Interactive Content – Intel Digital), Tom Duterme (Google) plus local heroes Sam Morgan and Rod Drury. The conference day alone will bring a wealth of knowledge – but imagine having a team like that on your advisory board!

The first X|Media|Lab event was held in Sydney in 2003. Aimed at spanning digital media and bring digital creatives and entrepreneurs together XML has grown to encompass multiple locations around the globe. The event has some serious backing from global partners and is supported by NZ Trade & Enterprise, so the entry cost is minimal (only $99 for individuals). Our research at GeniusNet showed that the most creative ideas spring from where different communities overlap and we have long felt that Wellington needed such an event.

Everything you need to know is on the X|Media|Lab website. But note that although the conference day is open to the public, the weekend workshop is only by invitation from the selection panel. If you require assistance preparing for the selection process and to be introduced to the organiser directly, please contact GeniusNet as early as possible.

Scaling Up the Innovation Ecosystem

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Thomas Nastas is an American venture capitalist based in the heart of Moscow. A recent blog post nicely condenses an article of his in which he explains how technology firms need to leverage success in their home markets before moving up the value chain.

Although writing about Russian and Eastern European SMEs, one immediately draws some strong comparisons with the New Zealand situation as he reflects on the role of government in national innovation systems. Like New Zealand, both Russia and Hungary have set aside funds to kick start a public-private partnership to co-invest in technology start-ups. But unlike New Zealand, Eastern Europe and Russia has a huge and largely untapped domestic market for technology products and services. Russia also has the benefit of an extensive programme of university research funded by government and the military.

Nastas prescribes a formula that involves SMEs targetting domestic customers and refining their product offering prior to approaching investors for cash to support tackling global markets. He quotes the example of Israel’s cleantech industry of water purification that grew up, with government support, around addressing a vast domestic need for fresh water. Exports of this technology alone are expected to reach $2 billion by 2010.

He also has some praise for New Zealand as a remote economy grappling with the need to diversify globally. By focussing where there already existed a competitive advantage, he notes how New Zealand’s exports of high end wine and meat products have grown substantially over the last decade or so, based on investment in technical innovation.

It’s a salutary lesson probably not lost on the architects of the Fast Forward programme. But we must not forget that agriculture isn’t the only game in town. High tech exporters like Endace, Rakon and Weta Digital sell their wares almost exclusively in offshore markets. The natural competitive advantage these companies enjoy is the ability to attract and retain an intelligent and highly creative labour force. Focussing only on food and beverage innovation within the agricultural sector would be a mistake.

Thomas Nastas first published his article in the Eastern European edition of the Harvard Business Review. A full version can be found here.

Grid Network to Support Trans-Tasman Research Collaboration

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With digital storage needs and computational demands by research institutions growing exponentially, it makes sense to get together on sharing resources. So the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) banged some heads together and offered to fund a $2.5 million project to set up BeSTGRID a grid computing “ecosystem” that includes additional storage resources hosted by a third party.

Three New Zealand universities are already hooked up, with the new arrangements which reduce duplication on software expenditure whilst encouraging collaboration and knowledge sharing through use of online tools such as video-conferencing, blogs and wikis. Other institutions are expected to join in the future. Research projects currently making use of BestGrid include linguistics, bio-informatics and earthquake engineering, but the possibilities are endless. BestGRID is part of KAREN the government owned high speed broadband network. The network provides interconnectivity between research and educational institutions in New Zealand, with the ability to deliver up to 10 gigabytes of data per second.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the venture is that there will be established a shared identity management protocol based on the Australian Access Federation standard. The Federation is not some inter-galactic peace force, but a technical standard that operates across Australian tertiary and research institutions and allows universal access via a single user identification. That opens up the possibility of including Aussie universities and research institutions in the New Zealand grid by linking to Australia’s own high speed research network AARNET at some point in the near future. AARNET already operates connections to the United States, Singapore and Europe. So the implications for New Zealand research institutions are obvious considering the constraints of the existing commercial service.

New Zealand will be hosting the 2008 APAN event 4-8 August, regarded as the leading Asia-Pacific symposium on advanced broadband networking and applications for research and education. The conference is to be hosted in beautiful Queenstown and themes include sustainability, earth science, medical and agricultural applications, high definition TV and seminars on network security. The event will be preceded by the High Performance Research Symposium looking at e-research projects and tool sets, being sponsored by Bluefern, the University of Canterbury supercomputing centre.