It was a tension-racked Vista Group lunch today, as a vital question was discussed. Would the prestigious group of Wellington business bloggers allow Jim Donovan to remain a member, after he announced his intention to write his final blog post on 28 March? There were conflicting accounts of the decision. One account reported that Donovan’s continuing membership was agreed only by the narrowest of majorities, just one vote. Another said that Donovan had received 100% of the votes. In reality, only one Vista Group member - Wellington mayoral candidate Jack Yan - was there to vote; the other members having pressing business elsewhere. However, Yan said that he had consulted online with the wider membership and was confident his vote had their full backing.
The Vista Group then returned to its more usual fare of business and branding matters. The scheduled topic of the month was “Wellywood! Whose bright idea was that?“ The recent proposal - that a Hollywood look-alike sign celebrating the Wellington film industry be permanently erected on a local hillside - has been almost universally panned by the media and by local citizens, not least Jack Yan. He argued out that not only would the Wellywood sign infringe Hollywood’s registered trademark, it would also be a poor me-too image for Wellington - a weak joke for a fortnight’s film festival, maybe; a permanent sign promoting the city, most definitely not. Branding is about being distinctive. However, Jack’s argument that city identities are becoming more powerful than national ones was rejected by yours truly, who came dressed head-to-toe in black, New Zealand’s national colour. It was a silent, but powerful refutation.
Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce’s recent policy announcements have received a generally positive welcome. Tying an element of institutional funding to students’ course and qualification completion, requiring a reasonable pass rate for continued access to student loans, and rationalising the many redundant or overlapping qualifications; all seem to have gone down well. Even the usual naysayers have been muted in their response.
I find all this both gratifying and somewhat ironic. In 2001/2, the reports of the Tertiary Education Advisory Commission effectively recommended doing the same things. In July 2002, the people named to be the board of the Tertiary Education Commission (including me) reiterated their support for such initiatives. However, some were ruled out of bounds for TEC, eg. student support was deemed to a welfare issue not an education issue. Some we didn’t have the funding mechanism to implement (and for nearly 3 years we weren’t allowed to address that either, even though we rated it the number 1 problem to fix). Some the institutions weren’t ready to concede there were problems - eg. qualification rationalisation and completion rates. Some, like polytechnic governance, were, frankly, just too politically difficult for the then Labour-led government. However, we’ve been jawboning away on this stuff for all of the last decade and, like water on stone, we’ve worn down the obstacles.
Given the name of this weblog - Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s personal motto En Avant or “Get Going” - you’d be right to assume that I have been very frustrated by the time taken for all this. Smart policy development and implementation seemed often to have been trumped by the need to not upset anyone. To be fair, all the ministers I’ve dealt with have had their merits, and we’ve made increasingly faster progress. However, there’s a palpable difference when dealing with confident and capable ministers who understand the big picture and can drive through policy change, despite the naysayers inside and outside government and the bureaucracy. Governments can implement sweeping change quickly if they so chose and have the right people on the job.
There are still some big issues to address, not least being pricing - how much, how it’s presented, and who pays what to whom. Any good marketer knows the importance of price presentation. The new minister has already stated he’s interested in price as an issue, although he acknowledges this might take a little more time to work out. Given the current pace, that shouldn’t be another decade.
Declaration: I am a non-executive board member of the Tertiary Education Commission, and was recently reappointed for a third term.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about 3D printers transforming manufacturing and distribution. I can add healthcare to that list. In one of its always-excellent science and technology articles, The Economist tells us that researchers are using 3D printers to produce replacement body parts:
Organovo’s 3D bio-printer works in a similar way to some rapid-prototyping machines used in industry to make parts and mechanically functioning models. These work like inkjet printers, but with a third dimension. Such printers deposit droplets of polymer which fuse together to form a structure. With each pass of the printing heads, the base on which the object is being made moves down a notch. In this way, little by little, the object takes shape. Voids in the structure and complex shapes are supported by printing a “scaffold” of water-soluble material. Once the object is complete, the scaffold is washed away.Researchers have found that something similar can be done with biological materials. When small clusters of cells are placed next to each other they flow together, fuse and organise themselves. Various techniques are being explored to condition the cells to mature into functioning body parts…
The raw material is grown in cultures from patient tissue samples, avoiding transplant rejection.
To start with, only simple tissues, such as skin, muscle and short stretches of blood vessels, will be made… Within five years, once clinical trials are complete, the printers will produce blood vessels for use as grafts in bypass surgery. With more research it should be possible to produce bigger, more complex body parts. Because the machines have the ability to make branched tubes, the technology could, for example, be used to create the networks of blood vessels needed to sustain larger printed organs, like kidneys, livers and hearts.
In case you think this is fantasy, the scaffold technique is already used to grow replacement bladders. Marrying the medical technique with 3D printing was a logical next step.Although the implications for healthcare are immense, I suspect that “appearance surgery” will eagerly adopt this technology. Replacement scalps complete with hair follicles will sell well, as will wrinkle-free, age-spotless skin. The mind boggles at what could be possible in the long term. Maybe those spam ads for enlarged male appendages might finally have something to offer that works! And who knows how competitive sportspeople will use this?
I’ve long argued that what NZ lacked wasn’t fast broadband to the home, farm or small town. If those communities want it, let them pay for it themselves (perhaps through a locally subsidised utility since it isn’t economic outside the CBDs and central suburbs of NZ’s significant cities). What we do need as a nation is superfast, attractively-priced telecommunications pipes between our major centres and the rest of the world.
It’s that need Pacific Fibre plans to address. At this stage, all they really have is an idea and an intention, so activity is focused on planning, partnering and funding:
The group is looking to secure funding and build a 5.12 Terabits/sec capacity fibre cable to be ready in 2013 connecting Australia, New Zealand and the USA – the initial proposal is a cable which will deliver five times the capacity of the existing Southern Cross system.
I’m told by chums in the broadband business that Southern Cross has plenty of capacity available now and in future, through relatively straightforward upgrades, but maximises its profits through high pricing, which discourages heavy broadband users such as film or online services being based in NZ. Pacific Fibre may simply be a PR pressure play against a de facto monopoly, but so far it looks real enough. I do hope that a viable alternative can get traction. Competition is always better than an unregulated monopoly - not just for price but also for quality, service and, when things go badly wrong, for back-up.
So, Rod & Co., I’m keen. Call me.
Disclosure: My family trust has been a long-time shareholder in Telecom, part-owner of Southern Cross. However, the trust’s investment manager has sold out now.
Update: Lance Wiggs has posted some technical details on the PF website.
Like any Telecom XT Mobile customer, I’m unhappy with the recent spate of outages, but I’m sympathetic to the harassed engineers at Telecom and Alcatel-Lucent striving to find and cure the problems. Anyone who’s ever built a large new system dreads a spate of apparently unrelated problems which act like pouring acid into an open wound. The shrilling and wailing of customers, competitors and often-ill-informed commentators does nothing to help. However, I’m struck by one curious feature of the New Zealand environment which should have alleviated the problem - roaming. One of the advantages of GSM-based systems is that roaming is very easy for customers and operators - it’s a built-in aspect of the technology and the business model. If I’m overseas, my phone selects a network from all those with coverage for my location (in my preset preference order), which I can easily override if I so chose. But back home, even though I can see other networks on my phone, my SIM card bars me from choosing them. That’s anti-competitive, as well as being a damned nuisance.I’m normally anti-regulation but telecommunication seems to need it. Operators naturally want to maximise revenue spent with them and not their competitors, but that should be achieved through pricing, service, quality and loyalty. Local roaming won’t diminish payment commitments under pricing plans and phone purchase agreements. If I was the regulator, I’d definitely be taking a hard look at mobile network operators barring their customers from using other networks (and while s/he’s at it, local and international roaming charges relative to own charges).
It’s been almost 3 years since I started writing this weblog and, like many bloggers before me, I’ve decided to stop. Not that I haven’t still got things to say, stories to tell, and opinions to expound, no; but I’m finding regular blogging has become a chore - which I don’t need to do. Also, if I don’t post regularly, readership will fall, and there’s no point talking to an empty room. On 28 March 2010, 3 years to the day after it all began, I’ll post my last entry here, revisiting my most-widely-read posts - the popularity of some has surprised me - and of course thanking you, my readers, for your interest and support.
I expect to still appear online occasionally, if more overt business purposes call for it (or as a guest blogger if someone invites me), and no doubt making the odd comment on other people’s blogs, which is what got me into this in the first place.
One of my objectives from blogging was to increase my network, and I have met a fantastic group of people through being online. Who would have thought that, blogging from little EnZed, I’d be in New York meeting the CEO of a leading US PaaS contender (that’s you, Sinclair) or having lunch in Grenoble with a Caribbean-born financial market commentator (hi, Rawdon) and his lovely French wife. Now my biggest worry is - will I still be eligible to be a member of the Vista Group of Wellington business bloggers? But there are still 24 days to go, so I can legitimately attend the March lunch and schmooze my continuing participation.
So now the end is near (cue Frank Sinatra), but not quite yet.
Click Suite is looking for a senior .Net developer to take a leading role in an online marketplace project. Very exciting. Pass it on if you know someone very good.
Put 90 minutes aside on 24 March for breakfast with veteran US investor Bill Payne while he talks about governance in early-stage businesses.. This is an Institute of Directors event at the Wellington Club, and neatly complements the IoD’s “Fresh thinking, First boards” programme aimed at lifting the performance of small and medium businesses through smarter governance.
Here’s some background on Bill:
Bill Payne is in New Zealand as the BNZ University of Auckland Business School Entrepreneur-In-Residence. to impart some of his experience to NZ entrepreneurs, investors and universities. Bill is a prominent angel investor - so well known he is often referred to as the closest thing America has to an Entrepreneur Laureate. His angel investing history stretches back almost 30 years after selling his own engineering business to DuPont in 1982 and includes being involved in setting up four of the most prominent angel organisations in the USA.
He has written a book, The Definitive Guide to Raising Money from Angels, as well as having written or been interviewed for articles in The New York Times, USA Today, Business Week and many other investor/education articles and websites.
From 1995 he served as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Kauffman Foundation for twelve years. The Kauffman Foundation is a not-for-profit foundation in Kansas City often referred to as the world’s largest foundation devoted to entrepreneurship. Its vision is to “foster a society of economically independent individuals who are engaged citizens, contributing to the improvement of their communities” and it does this through education (including mentoring), entrepreneurship, advancing innovation and research.
While Bill is in New Zealand he will be working with angel investor groups, running seminars, meeting with government organisations (NZTE, FRST etc) and serving as a mentor to some ICE Accelerator companies alongside the ICE Angels. He’s also got a blog up and running on the Icehouse incubator website.
It is very rare that we get a visitor of Bill’s experience and respect in New Zealand and for such a long time. Over 50 organisations including 6 incubators, 5 universities and potentially thousands of people will be able to gain directly from Bill’s visit.
You’ve got just two weeks left to enter the 2010 New Zealand Hi-Tech Awards. Even if you’re not an entrant, reward and encourage your team by booking a table at the Awards Dinner - it’s a great party (in Auckland this year on 7 May).
Once again, I’m a judge; it’s always inspiring to read the entries and interview the finalists. This year’s categories are:
PricewaterhouseCoopers Hi-Tech Company of the Year
NZX Emerging Hi-Tech Company of the Year
HiFx Innovative Service Product of the Year
Duncan Cotterill Innovative Software Product of the Year
Dell Innovative Hardware Product of the Year
International Business Wales Hi-Tech Exporter of the Year
Your core business isn’t doing very well, but you’ve uncovered a great opportunity for a new complementary product with low overheads, great margins and - best of all - recurring revenues. Wonderful! You’ve saved the company. Actually, no, you haven’t; not if your main business is still broken. All you’ve done is find some marginal new income which, more often than not, you’re hoping will disguise your poor performance elsewhere, hoping that a miracle will occur, hoping that the market for your old business will rebound, and hoping that your competitors won’t still eat your lunch.
Time and time again, I see firms - IT services, energy supply, retailing, telecommunications, consulting, manufacturing, etc, etc - chasing shiny new marginal revenue while avoiding the hard decisions in the core. Don’t kid yourself. New revenue might buy you time but, one way or another, you’ve still got to fix the broken old business; fix it or get out of it.
Completely one-sided but good-fun spoof interview with Bill Nighy playing a banker trying to argue against a a Tobin tax (a charge on financial transactions, initially suggested for currency transactions but much wider application is being advocated in the wake of the most recent financial system crisis).
In a new twist, Wired magazine reports that driving distracts cellphone users
Routine driving impedes a person’s ability to relay information from a cellphone call accurately to a conversation partner and to remember key elements of that information, say psychologist Gary Dell of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues. Although many drivers regard talking while cruising a straightaway as no harder than walking while chewing gum, “that intuition is incorrect,” Dell says.
The road safety legislators have it all the wrong way round! Same result though; just a 180 degree different spin.
A new initiative from the Institute of Directors in NZ aims to lift governance skills in small and medium businesses. Most are owner-managed, and many suffer from the owner spending too much time working “in the business” rather than “on the business”.
Perhaps the biggest fear for owner-managers is loss of control, but a good non-executive director isn’t there to usurp the owner’s authority, instead helping shape thinking and encouraging decisive action:
They are committed only to the company, but can be objective about it.
Combine this level of commitment with skill in critical areas - say, international trade, marketing or finance - and you can tap into a powerful source to guide the company and help it to grow and develop. A well-chosen board is also one of the cheapest sources of advice available.
A good board will challenge the perspectives and attitudes of the owners and managers. If the owners, perhaps unconsciously, have been used to getting their own way, they may find this a bit of a strain…to say the least. The smarter, progressive ones will get over it and recognise the benefits of being challenged, but also properly supported, by independent-minded people.
The role of owner, owner-manager or Managing Director can be pretty lonely. A board gives them the opportunity to test their ideas and get a sense of perspective from people not involved in the day-to-day
Another common fear is expense. However, just like hiring good staff, a good director will easily help you make or save many times the cost of their fees.
If you look at successful medium or large businesses, almost all have at least one independent non-executive director. Very few of those companies would consider not having that oversight and advice. Visit firstboards.iod.org.nz for more information.
Disclosure: I’m a member of the IoD Wellington branch committee.
The global Toyota car recall has been extensively covered in the mainstream media. Product recalls are not a new phenomenon in the car industry; even the highest quality marques have them. So why has so much media commentary, particularly in the US, been full of delighted glee at Toyota’s misfortune? Simple - they’ve had 30 years of hearing and telling each other that US car makers (and by implication the US itself) are rubbish, having been resoundingly trounced by Toyota in market share, production methods, quality and general admiration. As Dave Segal wrote in the New York Times last week, “Life … is just high school writ large.” Finally the smart Japanese kid who has beaten you year after year has failed a test. Schadenfreude.
However, if past experience is anything to go by, Toyota can turn disaster into success. In the 1980s, Toyota suffered a massive and widespread quality failure in New Zealand. In a country where cars don’t rust much (for reasons I don’t fully understand), it seemed that the entire Toyota fleet was rotting away, and people referred to their most popular models - Corolla and Corona - as Toyota Corrodas. Branding hell. After a slow start, cash-rich Toyota did something very few other companies could have. It offered a free panel repair/replacement to every Toyota owner with a car less than 5 years old (and didn’t quibble if it was several years older). At the same time, Toyota developed and introduced a virtually rust-proof multi-layer galvanizing process to its body manufacturing, and announced a comprehensive long-term warranty on not just the body, but the entire vehicle. A carefully-conceived, long-term advertising campaign shifted the Toyota brand positioning away from technical promotion to emotional connection. The end-result - Toyota became more local than the locals and one of the most trusted brands in the country.
US automakers should watch out. Toyota may be a bit slow to respond at first, but it has huge resources, and when it sorts itself out, then beware. Toyota will be back, and better than ever.
Yesterday I signed a deal I’ve been working on since late last year. You’ll no doubt have noticed the paucity of posts to this blog while my time has been otherwise occupied. No, I’m not ready to reveal details yet, so don’t ask. I will share one thing, though - the power of a good term sheet.
Having got past the basic decision to do a deal in principle, negotiations often bog down because someone tables a detailed legal document and everyone turns into amateur lawyers. The wordsmithing takes forever with lawyers heavily involved on what is actually low value work. Deals can easily fall apart at this stage. Here’s the thing, though; a few basic forms of legal contract will cover most commercial transactions. Once the deal-specific principles are agreed, lawyers can quickly modify their boiler-plate templates to generate a deal-specific legal contract.
A term sheet is a non-binding document, often only one or two pages long, that lists the basic points of a deal. We saved time, headaches and a fortune in legal fees because we documented the basic deal in a term sheet before the lawyers got really busy. They made some suggestions as the term sheet was negotiated, but only to make sure we were clear on what we meant and to avoid any pitfalls. Once we reached agreement in principle, as documented in the term sheet, the lawyers quickly drew up the legal documents in a few days, and it only took one round of minor amendments to achieve final documents that we all were happy to sign.
Entrepreneurs, business leaders and investors should know and understand what’s in a typical contract, but focus on the deal and hire a good lawyer My experience is that good deal-oriented lawyers not only can advise you on the deal, but also are great on the words.
“It’s only words, and words are all I have to take your heart away”.
Do you ever shout at the TV, radio or newspaper when a reporter or vested interest representative quotes some superficial statistics and draws completely wrong conclusions. With increasing age, I seem to be doing this more often! This problem isn’t confined to the media. Misinterpreting simplistic numbers because of poor qualitative knowledge is a common business mistake.
I’ve often warned people about this risk, but I often wished I had a simple example to illustrate the problem. Thanks to Tim Harford I’ve now got one. Britain’s Daily Mail shouted this headline:
Cracked it! Woman finds six double yolk eggs in one box beating trillion-to-one odds
The Daily Mail reported a woman’s astonishment at cracking six eggs to find them all double-yolked. If the odds of a hen laying an egg with a double yolk is 1 in 1000, the Mail argues, superficially correct, then the chance of two consecutive eggs being double-yolked is 1 in a thousand thousand, and so on, meaning the odds of all six eggs in the carton being double-yoked is 1 in 1 trillion in traditional British nomenclature (quintillion if you use the more prevalent American scale). The report sparked a flurry of paid media and social media comment on the phenomenon. Some people argued that the statistics must be wrong, because they’d also, and more than once, bought cartons full of double-yolk eggs. This kicked off speculation on a variety of causes, eg. flock genetics - extremely unlikely given the way the egg industry operates (high volume hatcheries are separate from production farms).
The answer is more prosaic. Egg industry workers can spot double-yolk eggs by handling, and put them aside for themselves. If, due to normal statistical variation, they collect too many, the excess eggs tend to be put back into the packing process together.
Good designers don’t just rely on statistics. They observe what really goes on. Toyota uses a technique called “standing in the circle” - literally drawing a circle on the ground and standing in it for hours, silently observing what goes on during a production process and then asking the workers why they did what they did. (That requires mutual trust and shared desire for knowledge and improvement). Before and after designing a new visitor experience, Click Suite’s interactive media designers watch what people do without comment, and then seek explanations.
Too many people use superficial statistics without knowledge of the underlying situation. They make business decisions based on false premises. As Alexander Pope once wrote in “An Essay on Criticism” (1709):
“A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.”
But remember, in business as in life, you can’t make an omelette without cracking some eggs!
Bear with me; this will make sense soon, I hope. Nearly 2 years ago, we put our stuff into storage and, with 2 suitcases each, we set off for the first of several extended trips to Europe. Having spent the time living in 5 different rented apartments in London and Wellington, last weekend we finally moved into our new (100 year old) permanent home. You’d think that in 21 months we hadn’t time nor space to accumulate much detritus, but no; it still took several car trips to transport our peripatetic selves to the new place. At the same time, the household movers delivered our possessions from storage.
Unpacking and putting everything in a sensible (at least for now) place is a chore, lightened by good and bad surprises - “I’d forgotten we had that,” and ” Why on earth did we bother to pack this?” However, one thing was no surprise. As we unpacked our clothes from the storage boxes and hung them with our clothes we had kept or acquired since, the pile of unneeded cheap wire and plastic clothes-hangers grew and grew.
Now I know we had a purge of such things before we put everything into storage, so how come we’d acquired so many since, and in such a short time? The answer is of course that virtually every garment you buy comes on a hanger, and every time you send something to the dry-cleaners or laundry, it comes back on a hanger. It’s a wonder we ever need to buy hangers at all. Inevitably you end up with far more hangers than you can possibly need. So where do all the surplus hangers go?
There’s much comment about unnecessary plastic and paper packaging, but at least there’s a recycling industry which can use it again. So what about all these metal and plastic hangers. Opportunity for some smart thinking, perhaps?
Another of my good summertime reads was Paul Krugman’s updated work “The Return of Depression Economics“, subtitled “and the Crisis of 2008″. Sombre stuff, you might think, but 2008 Nobel Laureate Krugman, a Professor at Princeton, successfully explains global financial problems in an easy-to-comprehend style.
After the Great Depression of the 1930s, the world’s economists and central bankers thought they had the financial system under control. Yes, there would still be dramas, but they wouldn’t break the system because the system’s managers knew what interventions to make. Yet, time and time again, well-meaning interventions often had unintended consequences. For example, Krugman explains how currency boards (currently advocated in some quarters here in NZ) seem to solve one problem but create the seeds of other, far more damaging problems. He also shows how regulatory and intervention mechanisms failed to keep up with the rapidly evolving nature of sophisticated financial mechanisms, the increased linkages within the system, and the hazardous distancing between risk and reward. The term “moral hazard” is explained by example, and occurs frequently. And Krugman argues that, contrary to popular opinion, the system is not as predictable and manageable as many people believe. Perhaps the biggest factor is the mood of the market (that’s you and me), which frequently defies logic and common sense, both on the way up and the way down.
Krugman finishes off with some broad-brush suggestions for financial system reform; in summary, anything “too big to fail” or likely to cause the system to fail should be regulated. Beyond keeping main-street banking separate from investment banking, I’m sceptical. If markets had been allowed to operate properly in the 1990s and 2000s, the system would probably have had some shocks but not as bad as those consequent to well-meaning interventions. Also, more regulation implies a degree of foresight and political/regulatory strong-mindedness noticeably absent in recent years. Krugman also doesn’t address any alternatives, eg. whether anything too big to fail should be broken up. However, I do agree that risk and reward (eg. borrower and ultimate lender) need to be closely coupled. The iterative repackaging of housing loans that enabled the sub-prime crisis broke that coupling.
My only other serious criticism of this very interesting book is that the updated version was written a year (or two) too early. Originally published in 1999 in the aftermath of the Asian and Latin American financial crises, the new edition brings in the most recent cataclysm affecting the world financial system, and explains how multiple linked failures brought the world’s financial system close to collapse, but the $700 billion US TARP package was only just being implemented at the time of writing. Krugman really needs to bring into account the events and interventions of 2009 (such as the auto industry bailout), and the way the world system coped. No doubt a further edition will address this problem.
Despite that, it’s well worth the time to read it. The Economist described Krugman’s book as “essential reading”. I agree.
One of my best reads this summertime had the somewhat dry title “The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective.“ Don’t be put off. Written by Robert Allen, Professor of Economic History at Oxford University, it’s a very readable* and convincing account of why the Industrial Revolution happened in 18th-century Britain, rather than anywhere else. Allen discounts any notions that Britons were superior entrepreneurs or innovators; indeed, other countries enjoyed similar advances in science, education, institutions and commerce. Instead, after setting the scene with societal and economic developments in the 16th and 17th centuries, Allen points to some primary factors which came together only in Britain and nowhere else:
The highest wages in the world (thanks to the Black Death and its effects on British society).
An abundance of cheap energy from coal (albeit not very useful initially, but developed to supply growing city populations).
Ample supplies of iron ore close to that coal.
Those factor conditions did not come together anywhere else, and so there were not the incentives and rewards for creating the wave of technological and business innovation that transformed Britain (and later the world). Allen also shows that the state played very little distinctive role in the British transformation. It was the cumulative efforts of individual entrepreneurs, engineers and other innovators addressing real business problems and opportunities which, because they were common in Britain, also generated classic cluster effects.
While interesting in its own right, Allen’s book reinforced for me much of what is wrong with current economic development thinking. All we seem to hear is more education, more science, more infrastructure, less regulation, less tax, and so on. All well and good (at least up to a point) but these are me-too strategies. Everyone else is following them, more or less. Me-too economies can’t make the step-change that Britain achieved in the 18th century (and sustained for 200 years).
The questions I think business innovators should examine are not only “What do we do to sustain and grow the industries we already have?” but also “What unique un-addressed problems and opportunities do we have which, if resolved, will enable us to build new unique and sustainable global competitive advantage?” And for policy-makers, “Will you adjust your economic development mechanisms to support those new initiatives?”
I can think of at least a couple of significant problem/opportunity combinations where New Zealand could build global leadership. Know anyone with some serious spare investment dollars?
*For those wanting data and/or academic references, Allen provides plenty, but they don’t get in the way.
