The Government should consider turning Auckland into a super city, or perhaps do away with local governments altogether and replace them with 3-4 regional entities, says a group of delegates to the Catching the Knowledge Wave conference.
A unified Auckland, with active links to Hamilton, Whangarei and Tauranga, would be better able to compete with Sydney and Melbourne, suggested a theme group at the conference.
Reporting to the final plenary session of the conference this afternoon, the theme group examining Sustainable Economic Strategies, made 10 recommendations, accompanied by a caution from the group’s chair, Andrew Grant of consultants McKinsey and Company.
“Some of these ideas really push the envelope so please treat them in that spirit. But also there is a sense that we want not ‘left’ or ‘right’ - we just want ideas that work.”
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Wealthy New Zealanders need to open their cheque books to support innovative ventures, and should not be frightened by the “correction” that wiped $3 trillion off global technology stocks, says one of the country’s top banking executives.
Scott Perkins, chief executive of Deutsche Bank New Zealand, told the Catching the Knowledge Wave conference in Auckland today that the Nasdaq has merely returned to its historic highs of October 1999 - and the wealth destroyed in the dotcom crash was wealth that had not existed a year before.
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Gurion Meltzer readily admits that Israel’s success as a knowledge-based economy will not provide the precise model for New Zealand to copy, but he says the countries have similar weaknesses to overcome.
Mr Meltzer, a senior figure in the Israeli business and academic communities and a former chairman of the country’s main telecommunications company, Bezeq, says New Zealand and Israel must both overcome small populations and small local markets, as well as a brain drain.
At the Knowledge Wave conference in Auckland this afternoon, Mr Meltzer said New Zealand has the opportunity to build on its advantages and raise its profile internationally.
“The capability of New Zealand is way above its reputation.”
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A burning national ambition, recognised and promoted by governments, is the foundation of economic recovery in Ireland.
“The Irish spent so long not being satisfied with their lot that we want to continue to grow, we want to continue to develop, and that comes through in political action,” says Sean Dorgan, chief executive of Ireland’s Industrial Development Agency.
The IDA is an Irish government agency responsible for securing new foreign investment in the country’s manufacturing and international service sectors.
“Irish governments aren’t about running the country - they’re about developing the country,” said Mr Dorgan, who spoke at the Catching the Knowledge Wave conference in Auckland this morning.
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New Zealand needs to track down its “chameleons”, people who have migrated to countries with greater economic opportunities but who have blended in so well they are not highly visible.
Professor David Teece of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, says tapping into such expatriates is critical in augmenting the skills available within New Zealand.
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The United States is 90 per cent more innovative than the other OECD countries due to a rare combination of factors, but countries such as New Zealand can succeed in other ways, says an American economic forecaster.
Dr Horace “Woody” Brock, a mathematician and head of Strategic Economic Decisions, told a group of delegates at the Catching the Knowledge Wave conference this afternoon that the US enjoys an “off the wall” near monopoly on innovation, such as England experienced during the industrial revolution in the 18th century.
He said that, looking at it another way, 75 per cent of the world’s economies together account for only 15 per cent of innovation - but other countries were closing the knowledge-based gap and the American lead would disappear by 2005.
Dr Brock pointed to US innovations such as the personal computer, the internet - and Viagra - and said there were four sufficient but necessary elements to the United States’ remarkable record of innovation.
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A knowledge-based economy is not entirely based on science and technology, says Nobel prize-winning chemist Lee Yuan Tseh of Taiwan.
“It has more to do with the human capacity to dream and to make dreams come true,” he told the Catching the Knowledge Wave conference in Auckland this afternoon.
Dr Lee, who heads the Academia Sinica which runs a network of 25 research institutes in Taiwan, said his country is undergoing a learning transformation that will see greater attention paid to the arts, music, morality and physical education.
He said entrenched Confucian values lead Taiwanese parents, families and the whole society to expect their children to receive the best education at all costs.
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Biotechnology can flourish anywhere there is the capital to support it - but researchers need to collaborate and address public uneasiness about their work, says the leader of the first team to map the human genome.
Dr Craig Venter, president and chief scientific officer of Celera Genomics Corporation, was speaking to the Catching the Knowledge Wave conference this morning via video link from the United States.
He said that although biotechnology research has been largely limited to the United States and western Europe, the arrival of the internet has made it possible for researchers around the world to participate.
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New Zealanders should not fear failure, but capitalise on it, says the head of one of the most famous technology think tanks in the world.
John Seely Brown, chief scientist at Xerox Corporation and a former head of its Palo Alto research centre, says if you work at the edge of innovation, you will fail some of the time.
“But firms that die return their nutrients to the soil,” he said, adding that he regularly recruits people who have learned from their mistakes.
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The New Zealand-born director of pharmacology at a giant US pharmaceutical company says we need to encourage “esoteric research” and high quality teaching at universities, while not underestimating the importance of teaching in our secondary schools.
Jilly Evans, speaking at the Catching the Knowledge Wave conference in Auckland this afternoon, described how her interest in science was stimulated by teacher Neil Akehurst, now teaching at Rangitoto College, who painstakingly built a model of the DNA double helix for his students in the 1960s.
Her second great secondary school mentor is someone she only recently met face to face for the first time, Jean Struthers, who taught chemistry by correspondence. Although she was 70-years-old at the time, Mrs Struthers’ passion for her subject inspired Jilly Evans.
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