Collaboration key to 'one-stop shop'

A Christchurch development programme is helping high-tech companies compete globally. SIMON COLLINS reports.

Every Tuesday night, 10 technology-based companies in Christchurch gather to discuss how to improve their businesses.

In an intensive 14-week programme called the High-Tech Launch Pad, the companies hear from a different expert at each session about various aspects of business and technology.

It's part of a unique approach by the city council-owned Canterbury Development Corporation to keeping the city's businesses up with the latest innovations and ideas.

"We are a one-stop shop for the whole innovation spectrum, from technology start-ups to high-end growth," says the corporation's technology adviser, Larry Podmore.

He believes the key to Christchurch's success as a high-tech centre is collaboration among businesses, local crown research institutes and universities and international companies with access to markets.

"We have had a competitive model [in New Zealand] and we are having to re-teach everyone to partner again," he says.

"We have some people who think in the Robinson Crusoe mentality - they come here as lifestyle scientists and want to just do their own thing.

"But a lot more of them, we have helped to get connected internationally and there are a lot of others who are known internationally."

CDC is coordinating applications by Christchurch companies and researchers to establish both "centres of excellence", which are being sought by the Ministry of Education under new tertiary funding rules, and "research consortiums" which the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology is now willing to fund.

Mr Podmore says local centres of expertise include the Antarctic, natural hazards, marine technology, arable crops, electronics and the new science of nanotechnology, which aims to develop new products from individual atoms or molecules.

"Many of the new businesses are across multiple sectors and require multiple partnerships," he says.

He sees a model for collaboration in Australia's cooperative research centres (CRCs), which bring companies, universities and government research institutes together for specific projects.

"They have to be connected with universities, so they are not companies in their own right. They are centres of excellence to build the country's capability and have a technology transfer element."

A Canterbury "innovation incubator" has been set up as a joint venture in the central city by Canterbury and Lincoln Universities, Christchurch Polytechnic, the council-owned power company Orion and CDC.

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