Floating ideas for a new surge

With the original Knowledge Wave Trust ending its brief, murmurs are growing about a replacement body, reports JOHN DRINNAN.

The 450 people invited to the Leadership Forum will play an important role forming networks that influence the nation's future while in many cases helping to achieve their own ambitions.

But it is expected they will also be catalysts for change at a different level, deciding proposals for a new organisation to fly the flag for the knowledge economy.

In August 2001 Auckland University and the Government convened the Catching The Knowledge Wave conference and debated myriad issues and more than 140 ideas for New Zealand to return to the top half of measures for the Organisations for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The theme was that this country had to confront some urgent issues if it is to remain competitive in the global economy.

In the aftermath, many of the sponsors and people attending the conference joined in the university's Knowledge Wave Trust, a privately funded body that aimed to keep up the momentum for change from 2001 and to advance the agenda.

Now, 18 months later, the trust has fulfilled its mandate in organising the forum and is being prepared for dissolution. But there are widespread expectations that it will be replaced with a new body, with a new brief.

There has been intense discussion within the trust executive board on how that organisation might be focused and run, but the final decisions are likely to be made at the forum.

Trust director Bridget Wickham, of Auckland University, favours a body that provides a venue for disparate groups in the economy and society that would otherwise never meet; a body that might overseas be called a social and economic council.

Wickham leaves New Zealand soon to live in the United States along with her husband Chris Liddell, the former chief executive of Carter Holt Harvey, who has also served on the trust's executive board.

Another executive board member, John Taylor, who retired last year as headmaster of Auckland's prestigious King's College, is likely to take a key role in any new organisation.

He says that, given the Knowledge Wave initiatives already underway in government and elsewhere, plugging away at a broad sweep of suggested reforms makes little sense.

Taylor says that the Leadership Forum has to come up with focused conclusions on leadership development. It needs to network leaders who are caught in their own silos, isolated from one another.

Andrew Grant, a trust executive member and director of the global management consultants McKinsey and Company, takes Taylor's approach one step further.

The forum has to be a call to action, he says, telling individuals they have to step up to the plate and accept their responsibilities to provide leadership.

Any new body will have to have more focused aims than the trust, he says.

"Last time we ended up with about 140 ideas and they developed into 30 good ideas.

"My personal view is that it would have been better to end up with five truly great ideas rather than just 30 good ones."

Grant says the large number of ideas had been hard to digest and in any case, governments tended to shy away from set targets lest they could not deliver.

Priorities had had to be set and that annoyed people who thought that their ideas had been given little attention, he says.

Indeed, there is a tangible sense of frustration at what the trust sees as lack of haste dealing with issues raised in 2001.

It blames that lack of haste on a national complacency about our economic fate during relatively good times.

But even if the ambitions and expectations were set high, the gains have also been notable.

Where the Catching the Knowledge Wave conference and the trust have succeeded most is in making the quest for growth and innovation a mainstream part of discourse between bureaucrats, academics, business and government.

Deutsche Bank's Scott Perkins is confident the 2001 conference and its ensuing activities have done a lot to raise the profile of the key issues facing New Zealand.

"We are in a comfort zone and we don't like to discuss these much any more," says Perkins.

"The Knowledge Wave stands for an honest, open, world-class debate of these issues and more than that - some practical suggestions of how to go forward."

Perkins is looking to tomorrow's forum to confront the key issue of economic growth and its "umbilical linkage to better communities".

"It will confront why our living standards have been declining and what practical steps need to be taken to lift our growth rate back to where it belongs. It will ask what impact a slow-growth economy is having on communities and educational institutions.

"It will be an opportunity to get world expert opinion on these issues to help New Zealand realise its potential."

On the eve of the Leadership Forum - convened independently of the Government - the term "knowledge wave" is common parlance and part of the public discourse.

The trust estimates that 60 projects or initiatives arising out of August 2001 have taken off, including some that were given funding last Budget.

Some were not directly linked to the trust, such as the $100 million Government venture capital fund, and the release of the Government Growth and Innovation Framework, announced this time last year.

The Kiwi ExPat Association (KEA) is an innovative scheme which links New Zealanders living overseas into chapters or groups to share information and which has grown to include around 2600 individuals living in 54 countries.

The forum will examine a Social Venture Accelerator (SVA) pilot programme with the First Foundation, overseen by McKinsey and commonly used overseas.

It links promising young people from tougher backgrounds with a business and education mentor and funds their education.

The Knowledge Wave Trust also commissioned research: one from McKinsey, Building New Zealand's Knowledge Platform, was released in September.

The report highlighted the need for swift action to build research and development, identifying five black marks against the way things are run now.

Another trust-commissioned study due out soon is from the economics firm Charles River, and examines New Zealand's capital markets and whether they are an impediment to growth.

The Government and the Wellington bureaucracy have remained distant of the privately funded trust, which has been seen south of the Bombay Hills as Auckland-centric because of the high proportion of Auckland names associated with the trust.

The executive board accepts that view, but says it has dealt with the perceived imbalance by dispersing invitations to the Forum widely throughout New Zealand.

Yet if there is any sense of distance between the trust and the Government's own initiatives, it would be hard to find a more robust promoter of knowledge wave than Science and Technology Minister Pete Hodgson, who was among 35 people on the trust advisory board.

He dismisses suggestions that the 140 ideas were too many to digest and says that all were taken on board and many implemented.

The issues facing the Government, the trust and its constituent parts had folded into one another such as the Science and Innovation Advisory Council (SIAC) and the Government's Growth and Innovation Framework.

As for the concerns that the knowledge wave could have had a tighter focus, Hodgson is cheerfully dismissive.

Who cares if it is 140 ideas, Hodgson says - we took them and we have kept mining them.

Herald Special Report - February 18, 2003:
Knowledge Wave 2003 - the leadership forum

Herald feature: