Unitec Business School

The NZ economy is ticking along at GDP of about NZ$153 billion (2010). To close the much talked about GDP/capita gap with Australia we need to find another $NZ 45-50 billion.

Professor Sir Paul Callaghan has analysed the revenue streams of NZ businesses and convincingly shows  that the quickest way to do this is to start-up/find 100 hi-tech companies and grow them to the level of our present ‘top-ten’ hi-tech businesses which are contributing approx $NZ4 bil, or $4oo million each.

So far so good, but when you factor in the data that it takes approx 15 years to grow a $50 million dollar business and 27 years to grow a $100 million dollar business, and we require 100 businesses running at five times that level of growth, then time is of the essence.

The game breaker in this system is human potential. We cannot go on producing more commodities, even with a high value add and expect our physical resources base to drive that sort of growth, in that sort of time frame. NZ as a country needs to harness the collective intellect and capacity of our population and infrastructure and successfully execute a shift in thinking around how we work and earn our way in the world. Its all in the mind grasshopper.

Two examples:

An online  game ‘Farmer Bill’ run by Zimbra (?) in USA has the simple goal of buying and selling stock etc to become the biggest farmer in the district. The game has thirty times as many players as there are dairy farmers in NZ and produces three times the profit of Fonterra NZ.

France has an economy based on selling perfumes among other things. A bottle of perfume selling for $100.00 probably has packaging cost of $2.00 and material cost of a few cents. The rest of the value is IP, or myth, depending on your view.

Both of the examples arise from the human resources of the countries concerned, not the physical resources of the land, and both are scalable in a way that a commodity based business is not.

So, how to shift student thinking away from “what we know” to “what could be in five years?”. I suggest there are two key planks to this platform.

One is to look outwards : global connectivity and travel. Our students needs to be able to see NZ from outside. A frequent comment is that we all think NZ is the greatest place on earth until we go offshore and then realise actually we are actually ‘a little bit crap’ at some things. Self knowledge is power and as an economy is made up of players, we need each player to be aware of themselves as a NZ entity, and how that looks in the world.

Also, offshore opportunities are going to be more numerous and larger than any onshore opportunities – but to see and understand these prior to exploiting them, we need to be there, either virtually or on the ground.

The second is to look inwards: Brain technology. Everyone is born with a brain which has the potential to form more neuronal connections that there are stars in the sky, but no-one gets the operators manual. As a result we often see rigid thinking patterns arise which then go on to limit the world view and ideas around what is possible of that brain’s owner.

We are a country all alone at the bottom of the world. Isolation through distance prevents us having the richness of easy cultural and language interaction with neighbours as land bound nations do, and this is a major disadvantage when trying to be a creative thinker. It is possible to develop brain practices that lead to new thought patterns, increased scope for creativity etc, and making more use of our brain potential. This could give NZ businesses an edge in the global market as we build on our reputation as innovators by developing that capacity further.

Bringing this strategy down to operational matters, it comes down to school trips and www.lumosity.com