Knowledge bank for bright ideas

Sir Ray Avery at his Laboratory. Photo / Greg Bowker

A knight who helped develop cheap lenses to restore sight for blind people in poor countries has a new project - a "knowledge bank" to link up New Zealanders with bright ideas.

Sir Ray Avery, who heads a charitable Auckland-based technology network called Medicine Mondiale, said it was often hard to find collaborators with the expertise needed for new projects.

"We need some central innovation portal where everyone can exchange information," he said.

His proposed New Zealand Knowledge Bank will be a website giving every Kiwi business 280 words to describe its capability and expertise, with the ability to ask each other questions and have conversations.

The site will include a facility to translate any page into numerous languages.

"You can imagine that if we make it work we could do one for Australia or Britain or other countries," Sir Ray said. "We could make it a global phenomenon like Facebook.

"This is the first time anyone has put everything to do with a country on one site." He estimates the project would need $4.5 million in working capital over the first five years but would then be self-funding by charging companies between $75 and $250, depending on the size of the business, to post information about themselves.

NZ Trade and Enterprise has agreed to pay part of the costs and Sir Ray hopes to fund the rest from other public bodies, industry organisations and private donations.

He hopes to launch the site before the Rugby World Cup starts in September.

Sir Ray, a former technical director of Douglas Pharmaceuticals, designed and commissioned laboratories for the Fred Hollows Foundation in Nepal and Eritrea to make intraocular lenses for people with cataracts in Third World nations.

He realised the need for an expertise link after he spent three years developing a predigested protein from waste products of meat and kiwifruit to combat diarrhoea and malnutrition in infants in poor countries. Only by chance did he discover that scientists at Massey University's Riddet Institute had been working on similar technology for 15 years.

"We need to double the number of companies that we have turning over more than $50 million," he said. "The knowledge bank is the real key."