Investigators' Blog

The first time I visited a prison, I was 12 years old. I went with my father and a group of musicians to hold a church service for the inmates.

We repeated the service in various parts of the prison, and in the minimum security wing I was allowed to sit and talk with the men after church.  I sat down next to a Māori man, let’s call him Bill. Not having been told it was impolite to do so, I asked Bill what he had done to end up in prison.

He told me he was in prison for driving without a license. I was shocked. Surely you couldn’t go to prison for driving without a licence?

“You can if you do it often enough,” he explained.

Bill had been in prison before, more than once. The first time he’d been too young, he told me, to realise prison wasn’t cool. Each time he got out he’d been determined not to do anything that would land him back inside, and every time he’d failed. It was hard to find a job, for example, that didn’t require him to drive. Eventually, he would get pulled over, found to be driving without a licence and sent back to prison.

Even as a 12 year old I could see Bill was stuck in a vicious cycle.

I also understood, even then, that Bill was more likely than my dad to be pulled over, to have his licence checked.

“Next time I get out, I’m going to get a bike,” he explained, “I’ll have a way to get to work and to visit my kids, and I won’t end up back in here.”

Over the past 30 years, I’ve often wondered whether Bill got that bike, and whether he managed – against the odds – to stay out of prison for good.

So what does Bill have to do with innovation?

To be honest, I’m wary of the way we talk about innovation. In a country where discrimination remains entrenched, inequality is growing, and the odds of people like Bill altering the course of their lives in any significant way are low, the fact that we describe something like Uber as ‘innovative’ seems, at best, silly and, at worst, downright cynical.

To be fair on innovation, all it claims to be is “something new or different”, which I concede is a definition even Uber could meet. My beef isn’t really with innovation, my beef is with the fact that we’re so keen to talk about things that are “new and different” that we often skim over history, deny reality and ignore complexity.

So here’s a dose of reality: research carried out in New Zealand between 2002 and 2007 showed a considerably higher rate of re-imprisonment for Māori offenders (55%) than for NZ Europeans (45%) and Pacific offenders (36%). Analysis of the variables contributing to this disparity pointed to the fact that:

“Maori offenders as a group tend on average to be younger than Europeans”^[i].

Likewise, when considering the disproportionate number of Māori in prison, analysts emphasised the impact of “the very large numbers of young Māori entering the criminal justice system for the first time each year.”^[ii]

Reflecting on this I thought about Bill, and looked up rates of youth charged with traffic and vehicle regulatory offences in New Zealand, by ethnicity.

The first thing worth noting about this graph is that in 2007 the number of young Māori people in New Zealand being charged with traffic and vehicle offences in New Zealand was equal to the number of Pakeha young people being charged – despite Māori making up only 24% of the total youth population, compared to 72% Pakeha.^[iii]

But perhaps you noticed something else about this graph? Did you see the sudden drop in youth being charged with traffic and vehicle offences after 2008? What’s that about?

Well, something genuinely innovative happened in New Zealand in 2002, something that may well lie behind this sudden drop-off.

In 2002, the Youth Offending Strategy was launched, building on the changes implemented by The Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act 1989, which laid the foundation for a genuinely innovative approach to young people who offend.

“[T]he New Zealand system represented the first legislated example of a move towards a restorative justice approach to offending which recognises and seeks the participation of all involved in the offending and focuses on repairing harm, reintegrating offenders, and restoring the balance within the community affected by the offence.”^[iv]

In other words, in 2002 New Zealand rolled out a new approach to children and young people who commit criminal offences. More than ten years later, apprehension rates for children and young people have fallen.

I’d like to stop for a moment to let you take that in, because it’s not something you’ll hear very often in the news: the number of young people being charged with criminal offences in New Zealand has dropped over the past two decades.

In 2007, 5067 young people were charged in New Zealand courts – that equates to 100 out of every 10,000 young people in our country. By 2012 that number had reduced to 3016, or 74 out of every 10,000. This is the lowest rate in 20 years.^[v]

This is very good news. This is innovation doing what it’s supposed to: breaking old, entrenched patterns; turning things around; opening up new possibilities.

But the news is not all good. Over that same period, disparities in youth justice outcomes for Māori have increased, and apprehension rates for Māori children and young people remain four to five times higher than for non‐Māori.^[vi]

This increase in disparities is driven by greater improvement in outcomes for non-Māori youth, rather than by a worsening of outcomes for Māori. In fact, the number of Māori youth charged in court has dropped as well, but at a much smaller rate than for Pakeha or Pasifika youth.

The number of youth charged in court has decreased for all major age and ethnic groups

So, what next?

Smarter people than me have reviewed all this data, and much more, and concluded that there are at least three key areas for further innovation in our youth justice system:

1. Deepen engagement with family, whānau, and communities.
2. Improve the data available to inform frontline decision‐making in the youth justice system.
3. Extend access to the youth justice system to young people aged up to 21 years.

Each of these warrants its own exploration, but since the official Youth Crime Action Plan focuses largely on the first and second of these, I’m going to close with an argument in favour of the third.

Currently, children aged up to 16 years can be dealt with by the Youth Courts, but the government is looking at a plan to extend this to young offenders as old as 19.

Our youth justice system is not only innovative. It also appears to be achieving at least some of the changes it was created to achieve.

For example, the number of children and young people given an order in court in New Zealand has dropped for all ethnic groups since 2008.

For anyone concerned that children and young people who offend are being let off too lightly, two thoughts:

1. The Youth Court system has allowed the community, including the family and the victim, to play a role in holding the young person to account in a way that is meaningful to them.^[vii]
2. Youth Courts have also exercised their power to apply adult sentences in serious cases in a small by significant number of cases, as shown in this graph.

New Zealand youth given an order in court by ethnicity:

All over the world, people are studying our youth justice system, wondering how they might be able to replicate some of these positive outcomes for themselves. Without ignoring the very significant areas for improvement, this is the kind of innovation we should be celebrating.

This is also the kind of innovation we should be extending, specifically by lifting the age of access to Youth Courts in New Zealand to at least 19 years.

About

Marianne Elliott is Director of Strategy and Story for ActionStation – a movement to reignite participation in our democracy and restore ‘people power’ by building a community of active citizens and facilitating collective action for progressive change. ActionStation is an independent, member-led not-for-profit organisation representing over 100,000 New Zealanders holding power to account, standing for human rights, a healthy environment, transparent democracy and economic fairness.

Marianne’s background is varied – trained as a human rights lawyer, she worked in Timor-Leste, the Gaza Strip and Afghanistan before returning to New Zealand in 2008. She is also the author of Zen Under Fire, a memoir about her work in Afghanistan, and co-owner of an organic Mexican restaurant in Wellington.

^[i]http://www.corrections.govt.nz/resources/research_and_statistics/reconviction-patterns-of-released-prisoners-a-48-months-follow-up-analysis/re-imprisonment-rates-by-ethnicity.html

^[ii] http://www.corrections.govt.nz/resources/research_and_statistics/reconviction-patterns-of-released-prisoners-a-48-months-follow-up-analysis/re-imprisonment-rates-by-ethnicity.html

^[iii] http://ethniccommunities.govt.nz/sites/default/files/files/EthnicityDataOnlineDemographicOverview.pdf

^[iv] http://www.youthcourt.govt.nz/youth-justice/youth-justice-principles-and-processes/

^[v]  Youth Crime Action Plan, Ministry of Justice, 2013 p12 https://www.justice.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Publications/YCAP-full-report.pdf

^[vi] Youth Crime Action Plan, Ministry of Justice, 2013 https://www.justice.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Publications/YCAP-full-report.pdf

^[vii] http://justspeak.org.nz/extending-the-youth-court-jurisdiction/

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Innovation is bandied about as the word “de rigueur” – it would seem we all need to be innovative and it’s even become the subject of surveys in national newspapers.

A recent New Zealand Herald article reported 97% of bosses saying their organisation has an innovation culture, when just 23% of employees thought this was the case. The study by recruitment firm Hudson NZ revealed a gap in understanding and probably a lack of conversation between management and teams, which after all is one of the most important foundations for innovation.

So what’s happening? Is it that we are now so bombarded by information and constant digital disruption that we all just have to be innovative as a common denominator? I don’t think so, because the best innovation is probably the simplest and the process has been around for a long time. While innovation does seem to be the subject of a lot of current commentary, as words go, it’s not exactly innovative – derived from the Latin word innovat or “renewed or altered” its use started in the 16^th century.

When we talk about innovation we usually refer to a result, something tangible we can touch, discuss or look at. But the process of innovation actually starts much earlier – it starts with conversations about doing something new or making changes to something established.

Here’s an example involving our company:

SimplHealth has evolved from another business called The Simpl Group, a systems integrator for companies working in a broad range of sectors. A focus area of ours has always been healthcare, along with a passion to make a difference to people’s lives through great innovation. Examples of systems developed include technology to run New Zealand’s national disabilities management programme called Socrates, the electronic prescription service in Australia called eRX and New Zealand’s School Based Vaccination Service. Then three years ago we decided to focus 100% on healthcare and we became SimplHealth – we made a simple change (no pun intended) to something already established and became very different.

Since then our view of innovation has developed, but it is still reliant on a steady continuous flow of ideas, discussions and observations involving our whole team, as well as associates, business networks and even friends and family. Innovation is all about using the resources we have, either existing or new, to generate better health outcomes. From our perspective it involves having information as a foundation, sharing it and collaborating, and then developing processes to improve the delivery of healthcare.

Take prescriptions for example. The archaic process of writing prescriptions has been around for decades, if not centuries. The pain point of this process is inaccuracy that can impact people’s health, and inefficiency because pharmacists had to decipher and then retype medication information into a separate system. So we developed SimplHealth ePrescribing, a digital system that increases patient safety by sharing prescription and medication information between healthcare professionals securely, whenever needed. This technology now supports the New Zealand ePrescription Service – we just made an old system digital.

The enablers of innovation are the people in the system – the patients, the doctors, pharmacists and other healthcare providers. Real innovation can only happen with the input of the various groups included in healthcare. The biggest opportunity for innovation now is for collaboration between people, companies and other organisations to develop new solutions. Real innovation starts with conversations and listening so as to understand the problems that need solutions.

Ten years ago you probably wouldn’t have seen two IT companies embracing collaboration but now it’s imperative. In New Zealand the health IT sector has taken partnership on board. In December last year, twelve health IT companies signalled an intent to collaborate together as NZ Inc. to deliver the best value and improve healthcare for millions of New Zealanders. Supporting this is the rising power of people and a renewed approach to information – this People Power concept is now one of the central strategic themes of New Zealand’s recently launched Health Strategy.

The graphs below show we are increasingly digitally focused when it comes to healthcare, with internet use for healthcare growing between ages and ethnic groups and health services being in the top five searches.

Innovation is about doing things differently and using what we already have to create something better for the future, and it involves everyone. It’s a simple idea that’s probably been over-complicated. With the growing data available, and technology for sharing and collaboration, now really is the age for innovation – but it all starts with a conversation.

About

Jodi Mitchell is CEO of SimplHealth, a health IT specialist delivering technology solutions to help the sharing of information, safely and securely, between healthcare professionals, to support better decisions, enhance health services and deliver cost savings.

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Te Hiku Media is a charitable media organisation, collectively belonging to the Far North iwi of Ngāti Kuri, Te Aupouri, Ngai Takoto, Te Rārawa and Ngāti Kahu. The station is an iwi communications hub for radio and online media. Māori language revitalisation is a core focus of Te Hiku Media, as is archiving and digital innovation.

Please check out the below video about the online Whare Kōrero o Te Hiku Media and the journey from terrestrial broadcasting to digital media. Te Hiku is also running a few more stories on innovation this week, so checkout tehiku.nz.

View the video: The Story Behind Te Hiku Media’s Online Whare Kōrero

Innovation can mean anything: creating affordable housing for Māori, recycling plastic for use in 3D printers in the pacific, or even hacking the API calls to Pokemon GO. For a small team at Te Hiku Media in the Far North town of Kaitaia, it simply means DOING.

What if we throw a camera in front of our radio news? What if we live stream Waitangi? What if we build our own online digital platform that helps streamline kaimahi workflow so we can focus on te reo Māori content? These may not sound innovative, but for us these “what ifs” required taking risks, rocking the boat, and just doing things differently. We’ve failed along the way, but we’ve learned so much. By doing these things, we were able to:

1. raise the profile of the organisation,
2. raise the profile of te reo Māori,
3. create new projects and initiatives within the organisation, and
4. win awards.

I’m meant to incorporate data in this reframing innovation themed blog (for more check out Reframing Innovation). While data is hugely important, I think the story of Te Hiku is a unique one worth telling that I hope it will inspire other small organisations to give innovation a go. Let me tell you that we had no data when we started this journey. Data may have been available, but we didn’t know where to find it or how to use it.

Consider our bold move to provide a 24/7 online television stream in 2013 (as a frame of reference, Facebook launched live video streaming and Twitter bought Periscope in 2015). We had to do this because the big analogue to digital switchover killed our Te Hiku TV broadcast in Kaitaia. While we had a small reach in the towns of Kaitaia, Ahipara, and Awanui, we had a niche and engaged audience. But the data for internet access in the Far North said only 20 to 40% of households in those towns had internet. The stats for Te Hiku’s audience — primarily Māori and kuia and kaumātua — would have been worse! If we relied on that data and the fact that we needed to spend a significant amount of capital on hardware, software, and services to provide that stream, then we may not have taken the risk of launching a 100% online TV station.

Check out the Figure.NZ map to see 2013 Census data on household access to the internet in the Far North District, New Zealand.

We learnt a heck of a lot by taking that risk. We learnt that no one watched our 24/7 online TV, but people did watch our on-demand content. We also learnt that with the equipment we procured we could do this new and exciting thing (we’re still in 2014) called live streaming. Iwi radio are no strangers to live, outdoor broadcasts — we have broadcasted treaty hearings, kapa haka, manu kōrero, and other events LIVE for the past 25 years. Radio is the medium of choice for outdoor broadcasts because, compared with TV, it’s more affordable and not too difficult. But since we had the capability to stream video online courtesy of the Ministry killing our analogue TV, we decided to chuck some video over our traditional radio broadcast. We first did that in November 2014 when the Hōkūleʻa arrived in Aotearoa on its Mālama Hōnua Voyage (marama whēnua in Māori… take care da land in Hawaiian pidgin). The team was thrilled! Yea, we only had some 350 viewers (that excludes our radio audience), but it was something different.

We then went on to be the first to live video stream Waitangi (Iwi radio live broadcasted Waitangi for more than 20 years), and we even used Raspberry Pis and iPhones to allow our kaimahi to live cross from anywhere on the treaty grounds. The staff were even more inspired after the Waitangi broadcast. Yeah it was tough. Yea we had dropouts and tonnes of bloopers. Yeah we got moved next to the Port-a-loos after being informed mainstream media complained that Te Hiku Media was given preferential treatment due to being a Māori organisation… but the audience loved it! We had a group watching us taking shots every time they heard us say iPhone (I think they had a good time). And the staff had a great time and went home feeling inspired. All of a sudden staff were saying, “can we build an app to do this,” “what’s the data like,” “what if we had multiple live feeds next year?!?!?!” (Eeeeeks).

Check out the video below from another broadcast that shows just how fun things can be when you get out of the studio and try something new. That’s a LIVE cross to someone on a zodiac.

View the video: This is how we LIVE CROSS in the Far North

But live streaming is just a part of what we do. We have 3 radio stations. We have a treasure trove of archives that need to make its way online. And we have to somehow manage content coming from these work streams. In 2015 Te Hiku Media applied for and successfully received a Vision Mātauranga Māori grant to further explore the innovative opportunities around live streaming, broadcasting, content management, and archiving. And that’s how the Whare Kōrero was born.

Whare Kōrero. Literally, house of information. It’s Te Hiku’s marae in the sky. It’s also known as a website, but we’re story tellers and the online whare kōrero is a much more compelling story. Plus, it’s more than a website. It’s a digital platform that aims to bridge the gaps between streaming, broadcasting, content management and archives (if you too would like your own whare kōrero, get in touch).

One of the beauties of building your own platform from the ground up is that you can adapt it quickly to suit the ever changing industry. If we decide we need to podcast, we’ll build podcasting in the platform (check out our NZ Music podcast — August is Māori Music Month!). If another Iwi station needs assistance in live streaming, we’ll hack together a web-based, multi-iPhone switching solution (again, get in touch!). The platform enables innovation in our organisation whether the innovation is around the technology in the platform, how we decide to distribute content, or the data we can collect from the platform. Innovation in one part of the business definitely spills over into others.

We’re also talking more about data as an organisation because we have easy access to the data. We know where our viewers come from, how long they’re staying on our site, and what type of content they like. The data has verified why our activities are producing the results we’re seeing. For example, the graph below shows the growth in pageviews on our website since launching our Whare Kōrero in November 2014. Note the spikes. These are events that Te Hiku Media broadcasted — kapa haka, manu kōrero, waka ama, Ngāpuhi Festival, etc. Each of these events allowed us to reach more people and raised the awareness of our organisation in the community. Te Hiku Media’s base audience grows steadily as a result of these promotional events. The two largest spikes are kapa haka… no surprise there 😉

Monthly growth in pageviews for tehiku.nz.

We’ve also noticed data spikes when an old interview in the Whare Kōrero gets a large viewership. It turns out that in these instances a kuia or kaumātua had passed away and someone in the whānau knew they could access the interview in our Whare Kōrero. Data like this demonstrate the value that our kaupapa provides to the community, and it highlights the importance of preserving and promoting te reo o te kainga.

Te Hiku Media have grown so much since first “going online.” We now ask ourselves how can we get more data to inform our decisions? Which collections are the most watched? Why do people spend more time watching one interview over another? We use Google Analytics at the moment, but when we consider the structure of our platform and the models we’ve created (e.g. we can include information about people and iwi in content), we may need to consider building in our own analytics so we can answer the questions that are important to us (building sometimes means incorporating an open source package, like Piwik).

We recently got back 100 transcriptions of old recordings, most in te reo Māori. We have hundreds more to digitise. Can you imagine uploading those tāonga to SoundCloud or Youtube? Neither can we. So our challenge is to find an innovative way that can enhance access to these rich, te reo Māori recordings. Simply chucking an audio file on a website isn’t the best, most innovative solution. We’re hoping to do some R&D and find a clever way to use these reo Māori tāonga to right shift all of Aotearoa so that Māori is as common as English.

About

Keoni Mahelona is a native Hawaiian who studied business and engineering in the States and moved to Aotearoa to study physics. He’s worked on driverless cars before Tesla was a thing, and shook hands with Hillary Clinton before he discovered the amazing Bernie Sanders. After his first, failed startup, he took solace in the Far North to help a Māori social enterprise innovate in an industry ripe for disruption.

Stay in touch

Te Hiku Media is on:
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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.

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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.

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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

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