Investigators' Blog

Our mates at Figure.NZ and Te Pūnaha Matatini have asked us to talk about what innovation means to us. As the Innovation Partnership we bring together like minds to drive digital innovation in New Zealand. We believe that if we can put digital at the centre of our education, business and government, New Zealand will be more productive, efficient, and successful.

One of our focus areas is to drive innovation in government. We want to do this because we believe that the innovative adoption of technology in government can increase transparency and make it more accessible for all citizens. It is a lofty ambition, but one that we think is important to drive democracy and make sure that the government is accessible to the people they serve.

Figure.NZ’s boards help show why we want to bring innovation into government.

If we take a look at this chart, we can see that people’s willingness to vote online in 2012 went up in all age groups when compared to 2009 numbers. People want to vote online but unfortunately they can’t.

We reckon that it’s high time government offered online voting. Estonia has one of the most digitally advanced governments in the world, and they’ve been doing it (successfully) for years. Currently attempts to establish online voting in NZ have been delayed by concerns around privacy and security. As a country, we keep putting it in the too hard basket instead of coming up with innovative solutions to solve the problems.

At the same time, voter turnout is decreasing.

One of the many ways that we could attempt to combat decreasing voter turnout is to take democracy into people’s lives, and one way to do that is to take our democracy online.

Data also has an incredibly important role in the future of our democracy. An informed citizenry is essential to a thriving democracy (just look at what’s happened in the US where how people ‘feel’ about an issue has become more important than actual facts).

As technology becomes more pervasive, people expect innovative, technology-based solutions to their problems. Understanding what people want and expect helps organisations across all sectors figure out what areas they need to innovate in to stay relevant. Data is one of the many ways we can gain this understanding, and the democratisation of access to data is growing everyday.   

Data helps us show that the proof is in the pudding, and gives us one more way to tell our story.

See Joe’s FigureNZ data boards for more insights.

About

Joe is responsible for the day-to-day running of the Innovation Partnership, including keeping tabs on projects and members, and making sure that the Partnership keeps moving towards its goals.

Joe is the Founder of Lean Communications, a PR and Communications agency that specialises in providing support for technology and ICT clients. His background is in communications and project management.

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Agriculture used to be New Zealand’s main bread and butter. Our small Pacific nation at the edge of the earth was bred on a “number eight wire” mentality, where ingenuity and resourcefulness was at the core of what we did, and the number of sheep was ten-fold the number of people. Turning pieces of scrap metal into revolutionary ideas that caused the world to stand up and take notice is something we have always prided ourselves on.

William Gallagher, one of the many legendary innovators who invented the trusty electric fence and led the way in taking NZ agriculture into the future, personifies the very meaning of number 8 wire mentality. But it’s not only NZ—agriculture globally that has had to rely on innovation to keep up the pace to feed the world’s growing population, economically and also sustainably. Farming may not sound sexy when you are talking dirty gumboots and 4am wake up calls, but it’s always had innovation at its core. 

In the reforms of the 1980s, when government support and subsidies were removed from farmers, and interest rates were as high as 20%, farmers had to innovate to survive; innovate to survive; innovate to survive. And survive they did by diversifying their operations, exploring new markets, and restructuring the way they did business. All this while increasing productivity along the way. 

We still see that today in the face of volatility in primary sector commodity prices. Because of that, NZ is seen globally as a world leader in its field for agriculture.

Over the last ten years we have also seen a thriving tech sector burgeon—a test lab at the bottom of the world where people can get ideas to market quickly, test them on a small scale, and then take those ideas to the world. In fact, that is how our company, Figured, started two years ago, and how we have adapted our business model during that time by adapting and evolving quickly. The intersection of tech and agriculture was the foundation for growing our start-up Figured which is a SaaS farm management accounting tool that works hand in hand with Xero. You may think tech and agriculture couldn’t be further apart, but the similarities between the industries couldn’t be closer together, and farmers, whether they realise it or not, are using a lot of technology in their businesses. But over the last few years there’s a worrying trend.

I grew up on a sheep and beef farm, studied agriculture and am passionate about the industry. I chose to study agriculture at university, despite being told that it was the subject to do if you weren’t smart enough to do anything else, and have gone on to build my career on the foundation of my love of agriculture.

More than 1/2 of farmers are over the age of 45, a much higher proportion than many other industries, like software engineering . There is also a reduction in talented young people coming into the sector both on farm and in all tertiary education fields, with student numbers reducing from just under 14000 students in 2008, to just under 11000 in 2015.

The agriculture sector isn’t just practical—the industry requires not only on-farm skills, but business management, technology, and science for research and development. After all, something everyone on this planet has in common is the fact we require food, and food comes from the agricultural sector. Then we look at the burgeoning tech sector – $15b contribution to NZ GDP is now coming from the tech sector, but the shortage of homegrown skills to employ from, and intense competition for skills between many similar companies, means we are often having to look offshore for talent to fill the gap (we know this first hand at Figured trying to employ good development staff on our team!).

So, how do we build the talent pool for New Zealand’s two most important export sectors so we can face tomorrow’s future challenges, and continue to innovate? Because at the end of day, our next few generations have some serious tasks at hand, particularly with issues like climate change, and feeding the world whilst maintaining a sustainable environment.

How can the ag sector use technology to continue to innovate and adapt, to survive and grow? And how do we get our young people passionate about the challenge?

• We have learnt a lot at Figured. As a part farming, part fin-tech start up, we have really developed a culture that attracts a diverse range of talents, ranging from pure technology background to those with practical on-farm experience. Compared to a traditional corporate model, our team enjoy the speed and delivery of real innovation that people can see and touch soon after the idea has been created. With the average age of our team closer to 30, we’ve cultivated an environment which aligns closely to how our employees prefer to engage with their work—they’re digital natives who thrive in a flexible, non-hierarchical culture with transparent leadership.
• Education from early stages is critical. Traditional IT courses at primary and secondary school should be moving away from learning Word and Excel (we only use Google platform at Figured), to software design and coding, giving youth the opportunity to experiment and create. We also need to take away perceptions that the agriculture industry is not for our smartest talent as there is a wide number of opportunities in all fields related to food production that is critical to our country, and indeed the world, which doesn’t involve just getting your hands dirty. This starts with our educators.
• Creating safe spaces for people to fail is important, but do so quickly so we can adapt and learn—this is the core of innovation.
• With more the than 1/2 of farmers over 45, we need to not just solve problems for their generation but be forward-looking in the solutions that our next generation require. The youth of today were brought up with the Internet and mobile technology and find it second nature. Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”.  We keep this mentality at the core of what we do at Figured by creating solutions that people don’t know can yet exist (yes, that’s even possible in the world of farm accounting!).
• Bringing broadband and connectivity to rural regions will make living in rural locations more attractive as people will still be able to connect, as well as manage their businesses more effectively (like using tools such as Xero and Figured).
• Encourage travel. I was fortunate enough to see many different countries, from India, China, the Middle East and Ukraine, to western countries like the US and UK as part of a Nuffield farming scholarship which enabled me to research technology and communication in agriculture. This opened up my eyes to the reality of challenges our sector faces, but also the opportunities that exist if innovation and technology can be implemented effectively. Travel also creates confidence in young people to go outside their comfort zone which is critical to an enquiring mind.

We always have had number 8 wire mentality—but we need to continuously re-wire it. Number 8 wire of today looks different from that of tomorrow, so we also need to ensure our future generations have the skills to solve the problems that don’t exist yet, and merging agriculture with technology is a good place to start the innovation journey.

About

Hailing from a sheep and beef farm near Taupo, Sophie Stanley shares her depth of industry knowledge as Head of Rural at start-up SaaS company Figured, which is Xero’s farm management accounting add-on partner. For a number of years Sophie worked in the rural banking sector, and in 2013 was awarded the prestigious Nuffield Scholarship, which enabled her to travel globally, researching the intersection of cloud technology and social media within agriculture. Upon returning from overseas, Sophie joined Figured as one of the first team members. Figured is now rapidly growing its business in NZ, Australia and the US working with leading rural banks and accountants.

Join the conversation

Join the conversation by posting in the comments below or follow #innovationNZ on Twitter. Comments policy: play nice. Comments containing profanities, offensive remarks or spam will be removed.

Want to start your own conversation?
Search for figures, data charts and maps compiled by Figure.NZ using the search box or Figure.NZ business guided search. Sign-up for a FigureNZ account to save content of interest to your very own data board and tell us about it on social media:

Innovation has become a bit of a cliché. The word has graced the spine of one-too-many books in the business section. As someone who researches and writes about innovation I find this painful to say but, if I’m honest, there was a whiff of the naughties about it in 2012 when Paul Callaghan and I wrote Get Off the Grass. Today we disrupt, we reimagine, or sometimes we rekindle.

So this week we’ve partnered with Figure.NZ to take another look – we want to reframe New Zealand’s conversation about innovation. This is not so say that innovation is no longer important in New Zealand. New Zealand’s research and development spending – one of the traditional proxies for innovation – has grown significantly over the last decade, especially in the business sector.

Yet we still lag behind many other countries in our spending on research and development, as you’ll see below. As a proportion of GDP we invest about half that of Australia and Singapore, a third of what Denmark and Finland do, and one quarter of what Israel does. This was essentially the story I told in Get Off the Grass, that we simply need to invest more in research and development, more in knowledge, if we wanted our economy to match those of other small advanced countries.

I’ve had many conversations about this since, and while many people agree, others find this statistic misleading. Some people tell me that we are more innovative than proxies like this suggest; that I’m just not looking in the right places. So our goal this week is to take a broader perspective. We want to look for innovation in unusual places.

In this broader sense, innovation is the creation and realisation of ideas that make people’s lives better. In some circumstances, this might be facilitated by businesses competing in markets to deliver better products or services. But at other times it will be about organisations in the voluntary sector challenging themselves to find ways to deliver better social services – or a not-for-profit finding new ways to encourage public discourse.

Indeed, there will be a second experiment underway this week. This week we are putting Figure.NZ’s platform for public display of data through its paces. Both the figures I’ve used above are built form data held by Figure.NZ. As the conversation develops you can follow the data our bloggers are using through their shared lists: my data board is here. I am really looking forward to seeing whether we can use these to enrich the types of conversations that are possible on social media using Figure.NZ’s portal to our data.

About

Professor Shaun Hendy is the Director of Te Pūnaha Matatini. Shaun teaches in both the Department of Physics and the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Auckland, and has a range of interests, including materials science, innovation, science communication, and the use of evidence in public policy.

In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and in 2013 he was awarded the E. O. Tuck medal for research in applied mathematics. Shaun tweets (@hendysh), blogs, and has a regular slot on Radio New Zealand Nights as physics correspondent.

In 2012, Shaun was awarded the Callaghan Medal by the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Prime Minister’s Science Media Communication Prize for his work as a science communicator. His first book, Get Off the Grass, co-authored with the late Sir Paul Callaghan, was published in 2013.

View Shaun’s Figure.NZ data board.

Join the conversation

Join the conversation by posting in the comments below or follow #innovationNZ on Twitter. Comments policy: play nice. Comments containing profanities, offensive remarks or spam will be removed.

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Congratulations to Te Pūnaha Matatini’s Acting Deputy Director Dr Siouxsie Wiles who was named a Blake Leader 2016 from the Sir Peter Blake Trust on July 1.

Siouxsie leads the Bioluminescent Superbugs Lab at the University of Auckland. She has spearheaded many efforts to combat barriers for women in science, including running a successful crowd-funding campaign with Executive Manager Kate Hannah earlier in the year to send copies of Dr Nicola Gaston’s book Why Science is Sexist to senior decision-makers in science. Siouxsie has also been praised for her willingness  to speak out on scientific issues of public importance.

Read more about Siouxsie’s leadership skills at the Sir Peter Blake Trust website or watch the Sir Peter Blake Trust video below.

New Zealand’s leading thinkers and doers are out to reframe innovation in a series of online data-driven discussions from August 1-5.

Technical expert Keoni Mahelona and Antarctic researcher Dr Victoria Metcalfe are just some of the leading figures coming together to start an online conversation about the state and role of innovation in New Zealand.

The online campaign is the result of a partnership between Te Pūnaha Matatini, a New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence, and Figure.NZ, a charity devoted to getting people to use data about New Zealand.

“The Reframing Innovation conversations are an opportunity to see New Zealand innovation in a completely new way,” said Lillian Grace, CEO and Founder of Figure.NZ.

“We’ve asked some of New Zealand’s best and brightest to write about innovation from their perspective, but underpinned by publicly available data that helps build an accurate and useful picture of New Zealand’s situation and performance.”

The team are hoping to show New Zealanders that innovation is for and by everyone.

“Aotearoa New Zealand has a history of inventiveness – from Polynesian navigation techniques to the introduction of refrigerated shipping, and social and political innovations such as universal suffrage,” said Professor Shaun Hendy, Director of Te Pūnaha Matatini.

“But what does innovation mean today for our society, culture, and economy?”

Join the online, data-driven conversations from August 1-5. Visit tepunahamatatini.ac.nz for more information or follow #innovationNZ on Twitter.

Meet Professor Tava Olsen from the University of Auckland. Tava is a Director at the New Zealand Centre for Supply Chain Management and was recently appointed Deputy Director – Industry and Stakeholder Engagement here at Te Pūnaha Matatini. Tava brings with her a wealth of experience in supply chain management and operations research. We recently caught up with Tava to find out more about her work and what she hopes to achieve in her new Te Pūnaha Matatini role.

Tell us about your research, including projects aligned with Te Pūnaha Matatini

My research is generally in the area of mathematical modelling applied to operations and supply chain management. For example, I am interested in how contracts can be set up in the red meat industry that create win-wins for both farmers and processors in what is a very fragmented industry. I use tools such as game theory to approach this problem. Most of the problems I look at involve randomness in some form and I am very interested in modelling risk and uncertainty.

What attracted you to the role of Deputy Director – Industry and Stakeholder Engagement?

There are large synergies between this role and another of my currently roles, director of the Centre for Supply Chain Management (CSCM). In both roles I seek to build links between industry and the university, although CSCM is focussed around supply chain and Te Pūnaha Matatini is broader. I very much believe in the importance of industry engagement with academia and vice versa. We have a lot to learn from each other. Also, I would like to see the University become the first place industry looks to get their difficult problems solved. This is often the case in Northern Europe but in New Zealand industry often doesn’t think of coming to us.

What role do you think Te Pūnaha Matatini can play when working with industry?

Te Pūnaha Matatini should be able to facilitate networks and connections. I would love to see us getting teams of cross-disciplinary students working with industry and supervised by Te Pūnaha Matatini staff to solve challenging problems. I think this could add significant value to both industry and to our staff and students. I saw something like this working very well at the University of Michigan when I was there and I would very much like to get a programme similar to theirs started here.

We’re starting a conversation. An online, data-driven conversation that seeks to demonstrate the diversity of innovation in Aotearoa New Zealand.

From August 1 – 5 we’re working with Figure.NZ to bring together the country’s thinkers and doers for a series of online data-driven discussions that explore the state and role of innovation across the country.

Aotearoa New Zealand has a history of inventiveness – from Polynesian navigation techniques to the introduction of refrigerated shipping, and social and political innovations such as universal suffrage. But what does innovation mean today for our society, culture, and economy?

We want to show Aotearoa New Zealand that innovation is for and by everyone.

Join the conversation
Join the conversation by following the blog posts of the country’s leading thinkers and doers or follow #innovationNZ on Twitter.

Want to start your own conversation?
Search for figures, data charts and maps compiled by Figure.NZ using the search box or Figure.NZ business guided search. Sign-up for a FigureNZ account to save content of interest to your very own data board and tell us about it on social media:

Twitter:
#innovationNZ
@FigureNZ & @PunahaMatatini

Facebook:
@FigureNZ & @tepunahamatatini

Bloggers:

By Caleb Gemmell and Catherine Webb

The Equity Office – Te Ara Tautika – at the University of Auckland has published an equity profile of the university for 2014. The purpose of these yearly publications is admirable – to transparently report how the university is progressing towards its goals of ethnic, gender and disability equity. Upon reading it, however, we were puzzled by the presentation of some of the data. So, in the helpful spirit of our previous Not Such a Silly Idea blog series, we started doing a little deconstruction.

Page 47 is about women in the ‘academic pipeline for advancement to senior positions. It shows the presence of women in the university from junior positions (undergraduate students) through to senior positions (professors).

There are several issues with this graph. First of all, can you tell what the Y axis is trying to measure? The numbers are too small to be a sheer headcount. A percentage, then. Eventually, we worked out that this is the percentage made up by women of the total FTE (full-time equivalent). Please label your axes.

Secondly, this graph looks deceptively like a time-series. It gives the impression that we are following a cohort of women over time through their academic careers (which would actually be very useful, by the way). However, the data is simply a snapshot in time across many categories. Truly, there is no reason for this data to be presented in a line graph; this is an ordinal scale, and the categories are discreet. It would be better represented by something like a bar chart.

The report’s use of the term ‘academic pipeline’ to describe the chart suggests that the report’s authors are attempting to show the retention of women as they progress through university careers, to gain an idea of where and with what magnitude women drop out of academia. Unfortunately, the overall impression we get from this graph – that women’s university careers tend to wane above Assistant Lecturer[1] until an uptick in the Senior Leadership Team – is not a valid conclusion to draw from a snapshot of data that compares the results of non-contemporary cohorts.

Another reason the pipeline analogy is inappropriate here is that it implies it is normal to progress from student to staff, and from teaching staff to management. This is not the norm. It is fairly unusual to enter the workforce as a teaching academic with little prior experience. The inclusion of the Senior Leadership Team on the end of this progression is especially strange, since many of those positions are not academic at all – for instance, directors of HR, library, or finance – and certainly don’t require you to be a professor first!

So, we tried to present the Equity Office’s information in a more useful way.

This pulls out the clearest information the data has to offer, showing how the gender composition of each academic position has changed since 2000. Whereas the line graph appeared to prompt lateral comparison, this graph highlights the change over time within each category. It cannot be called a pipeline, but it is useful!

You can see that there is now a more granular breakdown, including HoDs and deans. We did this to be more informative and to smooth the sudden jolt between professors and senior leadership. Something we noticed, apart from the greatly improved gender ratio in almost every category in 2014, was the huge change in the ‘Heads of Departments and Schools’ category. We realised that the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences (FMHS) were the only faculties which included both departments and schools, and that the schools were created additionally after 2000. That meant a greater number of heads in total, but not necessarily a greater proportion of women.

[1] The use of the category Assistant Lecturer, is its self curious, since no such employment position exists at the University of Auckland. The report’s authors say that the Assistant Lecturer category “…includes GTAs [graduate teaching assistants] tutors etc.” However, GTAs are typically postgraduate students, so would be represented twice in this data. The position of Tutor at UoA has not been in current use for several years, having been replaced by the position of Professional Teaching Fellow (PTF), which is presumably included in the etc. Missing from data are post-doctoral fellows, research fellows and senior research fellows. These positions often make up a sizable fract of many departments, the latter two positions being comparable in seniority to the positions of Lecturer and Senior Lecturer. The data is further confused by the fact that the mid-ranges of the pipeline might be better thought to consist of three parallel streams: PTFs (responisible for teaching only), Research Fellows (typically engaged in research, but not teaching), and Lecturers (engaged in both research and teaching).

Meet Stephen Marsland – a professor of scientific computing in the computer science cluster of the School of Engineering and Advanced Technology (SEAT) at Massey University. Stephen is also Te Pūnaha Matatini’s new Theme Leader: Complex Data Analytics. “Data is cool at the moment… but it would be nice to see people using it well and understanding what they can and can’t infer from analysis,” Stephen says. Find out more about Stephen’s research and what he hopes to achieve in his new role in the below Q&A.

Tell us about your research, including projects aligned with Te Pūnaha Matatini

My first area of research is the mathematics of shape analysis. This is primarily concerned with geodesics on the diffeomorphism group, which is a mathematical way of describing how flows of smooth, invertible transformations can deform one shape into another in the shortest possible way. I also study invariants to the actions of the groups that can deform images.

More related to Te Pūnaha Matatini is my work in machine learning, which has two parts at the moment: I’m thinking about manifold learning, where we try to find low-dimensional representations of high-dimensional data, and I’m also thinking about dealing with learning about multiple sources of data where all that you see is the combination of the sources. The first is a popular question, but I’m thinking about it very much from the point of view of differential geometry, and how that can help. I’ve got multiple projects going on there with collaborators in England and China.

The second project is with Marcus Frean, another Te Pūnaha Matatini principal investigator. So for example, you might see images of an object on different backgrounds, and you want to work out that the object and the background are different pieces of information.

I’ve got a very big project called AviaNZ going on that combines the shape analysis and machine learning, which is looking at birdsong recognition, in the hope that we can develop algorithms that will recognise birds from their calls and then infer the number of birds from how they are calling.

Finally, I’m interested in complex systems in their classic sense, both complex networks (which are networks with properties such as scale-freeness, or that are small worlds) and also systems where the interactions between agents cause the emergence of high-level properties. I’ve got a variety of projects with students looking at this, including in health, marriage systems, and soon, the evolution of barter (this last one will be funded by Te Pūnaha Matatini).

What attracted you to the role of Theme leader: Complex Data Analytics?

Data analytics underlies everything that we are trying to do in Te Punaha Matatini, but it isn’t really getting the recognition as a subject in its own right. I’m hoping that by exploring more of the links with the other themes I can make people more aware of how much data analytics there is going on, and what tools are available.

How can complex data analytics benefit New Zealand?

Data is cool at the moment (big data is mentioned everywhere) but it would be nice to see people using it well and understanding what they can and can’t infer from analysis. We collect data everywhere on everything, but lots of it doesn’t actually get used for much. For example, there are thousands of automatic recorders around New Zealand recording birdsong. But unless you have tools to analyse the data, you’ve just got a lot of memory used up storing sound that nobody will ever pay any attention to. Turning data into information isn’t easy, but it has to be done, and done well, to make the collection of the data worthwhile.