I attended AUT’s ZED Innovation and New Product Development forum yesterday. As with most such things, patchy but some of it was pretty good. Oddly enough, Chris Quinn from Gen-i, who spoke mainly about maintaining a culture of innovation in a large organization, was the standout for me in terms of food for thought. Both Hans Van der Voorn of Australo and Paul Adams of EveridgeIP had interesting stuff to say – Hans about the need for speed and product usability in startup companies, and Paul about leveraging unused IP. Australo are doing cool stuff – this sort of company that finds a tiny, high-margin niche and aims to own it strikes me as the way of the future for NZ. Bill Day of Seaworks and Geoff Ross of 42 Below were, as expected, highly entertaining speakers though Bill’s theme, how entrepreneurs think, was some distance off topic for the forum – enterpreneurialism and innovation aren’t the same beast, though there’s a strong trend within forums of this type in NZ to conflate them.
Couple of interesting quotes:
From Chris Quinn: “Culture is the sum of the conversations of the senior people“. So true – leadership can’t kid themselves that people won’t notice if they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
From Mark Cowsill (MD of Frucor): “Every company has a process, they’re all pretty similar, and I don’t believe they’re a competitive advantage at all“. An interesting perspective in this context, particularly given that the general theme of his presentation seemed to be “we’re really good at this stuff, but buggered if I know why”. Having said that, I tend to agree with him about the competitive advantage bit – the only sustainable competitive advantages are culture, recruitment, and ability to learn (which collectively add up to getting, keeping, and leveraging the best people). A screwed up process can be a pretty powerful competitive disadvantage though.
