Spark’s $15m Innovation Fund: “moving one tech generation forward”
Spark has established a $15 million Innovation Fund to help the company’s large business and government customers clear a significant hurdle faced when investing in advanced digital technology.
Sarah Walker, Spark’s General Manager of Converged Technology, says research conducted by NZIER shows tools such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things and computer vision can deliver huge productivity gains.
She says while organisations want to embark on the research and development that can accelerate their operations, they face barriers that can make it hard for innovation projects to get off the ground. That’s where Spark’s Innovation Fund can make a difference, she says.
The fund emerged out of work Spark did with the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research. They conducted a study exploring ways the nation’s larger organisations can use advanced digital technologies to address productivity challenges.
The study, Accelerating Aotearoa businesses one technology generation forward, pulls research gained from other small, advanced economies together with NZIER’s economic modelling and Spark’s own insight into the current and future opportunities fuelled by advanced digital technologies.
In the report, Spark CEO Jolie Hodson writes about the urgent need to address New Zealand’s poor productivity when benchmarked against comparable small, advanced economies.
For the last 20 years, New Zealand has consistently spent below the OECD average on research and development. Spending in the business sector is particularly low by international standards. As a result, our businesses struggle to get the most from technology transformation.
Hodson says: “…the pace of technological advancement globally is accelerating at an even faster rate, and advanced digital technologies are reaching a level of maturity where they have the potential to solve business challenges where it wasn’t possible in the past”.
Spark to invest in New Zealand businesses giving them the support they need to grow, to become more productive and to ‘move one technology generation forward’. This led to the $15 million Innovation Fund. The fund will be spent over the next three years. At the time of writing $12 million has already been allocated leaving $3 million that is still available for projects.
Walker says companies are often hesitant to commit the capital needed to get projects off the ground, despite their appetite for research and development: “Getting money for research is a hard conversation to have in many organisations. Which is why Spark was willing to put some of its money forward. It takes some of the risk out of the equation for our customers and can help them prove value from new technologies sooner..”
To submit an application to the Spark Innovation Fund or learn more, visit spark.co.nz/innovation-fund