A few of the regions most successful and promising companies came together last Monday evening at the first ever Tauranga Innovation Skills event. Elyse Wyatt of Velox Innovation gives a fantastic recap of the event:
Held at the new high-tech Robotics Plus co-working space at Newnham Park, around 30 people partook in what was to be one of our most enthusiastic sessions yet. A huge thank you goes to Tina Jennen for helping to bring together such incredible people, and Alistair Scarfe for allowing us into his brand new facility!
The goal of these sessions has been to trial an open, loosely coupled think-tank designed to bring together the nations top CEO's, engineers, entrepreneurs, managers and domain experts to collaborate and share knowledge about product commercialisation barriers. However innovative we kiwis are, our problems are often more deeply connected than our responses. Previous events have included Auckland, Dunedin, Christchurch, and Auckland again. Our initial goal is to have these think-tanks happening on a regular basis in every region of New Zealand.
Newnham Park Innovation Centre is a horticultural-based business park, home to a number of award-winning innovation focused companies. All enterprises operating from the Te Puna, Tauranga based hub have positioned themselves within high-growth, high-value primary industry niches. These include research and development, horticultural management consultancy, innovation and science, processing and export, robotics, marketing, and product development.
Co-founded by top entrepreneur Steve Saunders and exporter Rob Jeffrey, Newnham Park was formally opened in 2010. Its continued expansion to accommodate rapid growth has included the new facility and co-working space for Robotics Plus, and we were lucky enough to host the Innovation Skills event right there. Robotics Plus is a very exciting company, headed by Steve and Alistair Scarfe, and is making huge headway in robotic technology for orchards and fruit processing.
Companies represented at the event included Comvita, WNT Ventures, LIC, Trimble Geospatial, GEA, Callaghan Innovation, Locus Research, Heilala Vanilla, Venture Centre, Plus Group, NZTE and Robotics Plus to name a few.
"These events go a long way in fostering the collaboration New Zealand's innovation community so desperately needs. I've been lucky enough to attend a couple of Innovation Skills events now, in various regions, and have seen the same positive impact at each session."
- Gregor Steinhorn, Innovation Analyst at Comvita
The calibre of attendees was fantastic, and the session was a great opportunity for people involved in the local ecosystem to network.
When registering for this event, we asked each person to answer this question, in order to form the discussion topics for the session. Instead of choosing the most popular theme and using that for the discussion, we narrowed down to five main themes from the answers submitted:
1. Going Global
Speed
Compliance
2. Managing Innovation Alongside BAU (Business As Usual)
Revolving doors
Sales & growth etc
3. Innovation Pipeline
Validation
Deal flow
VOC
4. Innovation Enablers
Knowledge
Agency support
5. Innovation Targets
Waste
Digitisation
We then asked the group as a whole to verbally choose one to focus on...
To structure feedback appropriately, we decided to identity the stakeholders involved, discuss all problems, and then potential solutions.
Stakeholders
These are parties we chose as being the most directly affected by the management of innovation.
Problems
Solutions
Many of the solutions offered by the group are real examples they have worked on in their own organisations:
Read more about the event, including feedback from participants, here.
Original article posted on Velox Website by Elyse Wyatt
