New Zealand’s innovation ecosystem Shaun Hendy

1. New Zealand’s innovation
ecosystem
Shaun Hendy
MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced
Materials and Nanotechnology
@hendysh
shaun.hendy@vuw.ac.nz
sciblogs.co.nz/a-measure-of-science

2. Sir Paul Callaghan (1947-2012)
“Sir Paul Callaghan stands alongside Maurice Wilkins, Alan
MacDiarmid, Ernest Rutherford and William Pickering as one of
New Zealand's greatest scientists"
Deputy Prime Minister, Bill English

3. Do we choose to be poor?
Iceland
New Zealand Japan USA
Canada Switzerland
Australia
Greece Spain UK Ireland
Sweden
Finland Austria
Italy Netherlands
Germany Belgium
France
2005

4. Do we choose to be poor?
$500,000
Revenue per employee
$400,000
Fonterra
$300,000
Fisher and Paykel Healthcare
NZ Manufacturing Exports
Total NZ Manufacturing
$200,000
Needed
Food manufacturing for current
per capita GDP
$100,000 Wine
Tourism
0
100,000 200,000 300,000
FTE of employment http://mash.hashbang.co.nz/

5. Innovate?
Source: triadic patents, OECD
Philip McCann, New Zealand Economic Papers, 43: 3, 279-314 (2009)

6. My approach: data
Applicant
Patent Inventor Country Export
Scientific Authors
article

7. The world is not flat: patents
Bigger cities produce more
patents per capita
Source: OECD REGPAT database

8. The world is not flat: scientific articles
Innovators are better
connected in bigger
cities

9. Ecosystems
Ecosystems
are complex
systems that
contain a
few large
players and
lots of small
players
Enquist, Brown & West, Nature 395, 163-165(1998)

10. Innovation Ecosystems
Ecosystems
are complex
systems that
contain a
few large
players and
lots of small
players
OECD REGPAT database

11. Nokia’s inventor network
2006
More than 1300 inventors in Nokia’s largest connected
component

12. Nokia’s applicant network
More than 450 Finnish companies in Nokia’s patent network

13. Innovation ecosystems
Ecosystems
contain a
few large
players and
lots of small
players

14. Intuitive surgical is embedded in
the largest network we have
found
• it has more than 20,000
individual inventors
• it stretches from
San Francisco to San Diego
• it involves a large number of
small to medium companies

15. Innovation Ecosystems: New Zealand
• We released the Innovation Ecosystem Map in April
• The map geo-locates inventors and the links between inventors
in Google Earth sciblogs.co.nz/a-measure-of-science

16. Innovation Ecosystems: New Zealand
NZs largest inventor
network
• 450 inventors
• 14 NZ companies
• 4 CRIs
• 3 Universities

17. Economic indicators
Using revealed comparative advantage we can identify New Zealand’s
strengths on the map of product space (black dots)
Social sciences
Plant, animal, agricultural and
5% 10%9% 6% 8% environmental science
5% 13%
Physical sciences and
engineering
30% 36%
33% Medical sciences
28%
17% Mathematics and computer
science
Biological sciences

18. Innovation Ecosystems: Biomass
BERD
The biomass in an innovation
ecosystem is R&D spending

19. A City of Four Million People?
• Economic geography 101:
If New Zealand was a city of four million people, our GDP
per capita would exceed that of Australia
• Can we learn to act like a city of four million?

20. A City of Four Million People?
• The industrial revolution was driven by specialisation and
increasing returns to scale in manufacturing
• The knowledge revolution is being driven by similar effects in
research and development
• In the future, research and development will be undertaken
by large multi-disciplinary teams of specialised researchers
• As a small country, to build these teams we will need to drive
down the spatial transaction costs in generating knowledge
• New Zealand must embrace open research and data
exchange, across Institutes, companies and regions

21. A City of Four Million People: the CoREs

22. A City of Four Million People:
the MacDiarmid Institute
Auckland University
Massey University Auckland
GNS Science
Industrial Research Ltd Palmerston Nth
Victoria University
Wellington
Christchurch
Canterbury University
Dunedin
300 km
Otago University

23. A City of Four Million People:
the MacDiarmid Institute
2002-04 2007-09
Source: ISI Web of Science

24. A City of Four Million People: my wishlist
• Organisations will need to collaborate: We need to promote a
culture of openness and information exchange
• People need to find other people: We need better tools for
identifying expertise and IP
• Ideas need to find other ideas: We need better data
management!

25. Summary
• Bibliometrics
– S. C. Hendy “New Zealand’s bibliometric record in research and
development: 1990-2008”, New Zealand Science Review 67 56-59
(2010)
• Patents
– S. C. Hendy and C. Sissons “Innovators, Innovation and Increasing
Returns to Scale: Solving New Zealand's Productivity Paradox”, New
Zealand Science Review 68 28-32 (2011)
• Products
– D. O’Neale, X. Y. Zhang and S. C. Hendy, in preparation