Free gateway to Kiwi innovation now live

 Scale-Up NZ  is now live, launching with a pool of over 500 profiles of innovative, ambitious businesses, and growing. It will deliver accurate insights on innovative New Zealand companies, aiming to remove information gaps that too often prevent our businesses from achieving their potential.

The best innovations rarely happen in isolation. Consider the case of Canterbury engineer, the late Sir William Hamilton. In the early 1950s, Bill had the idea of building a motor boat that could travel up the shallowest South Island rivers.

The propellers conventional boats used soon hit the river bottom. So he set to work on a jet-powered boat, removing the underwater appendages.

The waterjet design he came up with in 1954 formed the basis of the Hamilton jetboat, which became sought after all over the world. It is one of our biggest engineering exports to date. But it was suggestions from Bill’s key collaborators that led to some of the jet boat’s design breakthroughs.

In particular, the idea floated by farm hand turned engineer Alf Dick to place the engine’s jet nozzle just above the water, rather than beneath it, allowed the speed and handling improvements that paved the way for the jet boat’s success.

Sir William is considered one of our true ‘bloke in a shed’ inventors. But he didn’t do it alone. Collaboration was crucial to his success.

Struggling with business leads

Over sixty years later, collaboration is the name of the game. But too many of our innovators are going it alone. Our innovation ecosystem still isn’t as developed as in other small advanced economies like Israel and Ireland. Our businesses are failing to access the technical knowhow, management expertise and investment capital required to get them to the next level.  

Why is this? Innovators and entrepreneurs tell us a key reason is they just don’t know who is out there to lend a hand. They can’t see where they fit in, or what their peers are doing. Information on potential business partners, pools of technical expertise and funders is fragmented. Information is the lifeblood of innovation, but few entrepreneurs have the time to trawl the web looking for it so they can make the connections essential for their idea to prosper.

Scale-Up NZ

That’s why as New Zealand’s innovation agency, we were compelled to deliver Scale-Up NZ, a free online platform that lets our innovative businesses more easily find, or be found by, partners, capital and talent.

Scale-Up NZ offers the opportunity to showcase companies and their innovations, so that potential investors and collaborators here and overseas can more easily discover and connect with them.

The platform is based on the hugely successful Start-Up Nation Finder, which provides information on over 7,000 organisations that make up Israel’s innovation ecosystem. Thousands of people use Start-Up Nation Finder every day to search for Israeli start-ups, potential partners and investors. That’s what we are aiming for here.

Verified, tagged and relevant information

Already we have over 500 companies listed on Scale-Up NZ. It removes the labour in trawling LinkedIn, Google or paid access sites to discover potential collaborators. With information assembled and vetted by our team of data analysts trusted information can be found in one neutral place.

Using publicly available sources of information or data provided by profiled companies with their consent for publication, we will also track as best we can the funding going to companies and categories of innovation, giving businesses an industry-wide investment snapshot. We’ve made it as easy as possible to login and navigate the site with the ability to create a personal collection of companies, investors, hubs and multinationals to keep tabs on.

Companies can set up and maintain a profile to support their marketing efforts and we’ll help ensure the information is maintained to a high standard. The analysts can vet requests for introductions through the platform, checking with both parties to make sure they are genuine enquiries that are likely to be productive.

Connections a key growth driver

Scale-Up NZ is about getting the best out of our innovation ecosystem, fostering the connections that will help grow companies, talent and capital. It is these types of linkages that will allow our best ideas to translate into innovations that can rapidly go global and generate export revenues for our country.

As our recent Growing the Pie report reveals, we’ve been more successful at that than we sometimes give ourselves credit for, with a stable of companies emerging in the last fifteen years or so creating more than $34 billion in value. At least nine of these Kiwi ‘unicorns’, A2 Milk and Xero among them, have a valuation north of $1 billion.

We need to do more. But like Sir William we can’t do it alone. We need the innovation ecosystem to help us build out the data, so that the hundreds of profiles on the platform today will become thousands within a year or so.

In Scale-Up NZ, we’ve built what promises to become a piece of critical infrastructure for the long-term success of our innovation ecosystem by fostering the collaboration that’s essential to competing in a rapidly changing world. By having Scale-Up NZ based on the same basic platform as Start-Up Nation Finder, over time we’ll be able to benchmark ourselves against, and learn from, Israel, Ireland and other small advanced economies countries on this or similar platforms.

So we hope the business community makes the most of it, by getting on board and finding the information and the collaborators they need to thrive.

Visit www.scaleup.nz to sign up to the platform and create your own company profile.

Article by Erica Lloyd (pictured below) GM – Market and Sectors, Callaghan Innovation.