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Posts Tagged Innovation

Lightning Lab startups ask – ‘where’s the money’? Peter Kerr May 21

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Lightning Lab 2013 saw nine startups pitch their digital products to would-be investors last week, seeking expansion capital for ideas that 12 weeks before mostly existed on paper.

The Wellington Demo Day saw highly polished presentations, with clear development plans and just as clear ‘here’s how we and our investors are going to make money’ to about 300 people at Te Papa’s Soundings Theatre. About half the audience were financiers.

Any investment secured goes to the next stage of development and expansion into global markets.

My initial underlying thought was jealousy.

Why? Because the participants have obviously learned so much.

Tui Te Hau, CEO of Wellington startup incubator Creative HQ up summed this rationale better than I can.

“Lightning Lab is turning out 30 entrepreneurs with a harder edge and keener and smarter drive to succeed than many. How far they go is up to them, but these companies are 12 weeks old and they already have more scars than most get in several years.”

These nine companies were whittled from 87 applications to LL late last year, and each received $6000 per head from a set of founding investors. By being part of a three month intensive acceleration programme, their digital concepts have been validated, built and established with early customers.

The startups have been mentored by local and international advisers, faced hard deadlines in growth targets and a structured model for accelerating early stage business growth based on international best practice.

When Te Hau talks about scars, she’s not exaggerating – but obtaining them so quickly and with the ability to ask advice such as “what should we do now” in such a concentrated manner – is something so valuable it really can’t be priced.

What is patently clear is that the 30 participants, and their wider networks, have had such an injection of entrepreneurial spirit and possibilities that multiplier spinoffs and benefits can only result for Wellington and New Zealand.

Put another way; this programme, with its hand-holding, arse-kicking and question-asking intensiveness will create a virtuous circle of increasing wealth.

And sure, like all of us, these startups have, and will make mistakes.

But, they know what needs to be done to get back on track, or alternatively how to fail-fast (and then get on with another project).

Because the Demo Day was asking for money, what can be reported publicly is limited.

Suffice to say that (and you’d have to imagine that the mentoring has been also strong in this area) the investment dollars being asked for by the startups seemed reasonable and appropriate.

Many of the companies had potential exponential growth rates, but realism ruled.

It is now up to the individual companies themselves to reveal if or what investment(s) have been made in them – and as this becomes known Lightning Lab will have its own raison d’etre validated.

For the record, those presenting were:

LearnKo – delivers online learning programs to English language organisations in Asia, harnessing Australasian tutors, training them and providing them with content to deliver through an online classroom

Publons – platform for crowd-sourced peer-review of academic articles, where academics build a reputation for their contributions. An alternative to the extremely slow, expensive and closed status quo of the past 300 years of academic publishing

Adeez – specialist mobile marketing platform, enabling brands and their agencies to increase their ROI on mobile marketing

Expander – tracking and analytics platform that protects brands by providing them with powerful tools to combat counterfeit, while connecting manufacturers and consumers

teamisto – turn a typical business sponsorship donation to an amateur sports club or team into an effective advertising channel with measurable results

Questo – works with organisations by providing a platform to create activities with incentives and rewards to engage their visitors. A mobile app and analytics engine provides the ability to track, measure and evaluate their visitors’ behaviour

promoki – social media platform that gamifies photo and video contests. Help brands co-create advertising campaigns with their audience and distribute crowd-filled media across multiple social networks

Kidsgomobile – software device to help parents teach their children to become responsible users of their first smartphone. Tool that notifies parents if their child engages in potentially risky phone behaviour and helps them resolve these issues

WIP – platform that enables professional video makers to share their work-in-progress videos with their team and clients to gather precise and meaningful feedback

Without doubt, some of these startups will go on to become much larger businesses. Without doubt too, most of them would not have got to this ‘go’ position without Lightning Lab.

The learning has been immense, and a thumbs up to those investors and sponsors who put their hands in their pockets from the get-go to kick the whole thing off.

Applications for the next Lightning Lab 2014 will open in September this year.


National Science Challenge winners underwhelm Peter Kerr May 14

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There’s only one word really to describe the winners of the National Science Challenge – ‘wow’ writ small.

Or, perhaps it is just me that is completely underwhelmed by the announcement of 10 research areas that can comfortably be binned as business as usual.

Though, pity the team tasked with coming up with an overview of the NSC considering there were only 200 entries from greater New Zealand on where and what we should research.

Right from the get-go the challenge lacked direction, had a sort of what is it all about non-rationale.

As chairman of the NSC, the prime minister’s chief science adviser Sir Peter Gluckman is obliged to put a positive spin on the challenge.

As he commented recently:

“The intent is to invigorate the science system, allowing it to become more collaborative and strategic in its approach.”

As the Tui billboards say,

‘Yeh, right’

But firstly, a reminder of the challenges selected.

  • Aging well – harnessing science to sustain health and wellbeing into the later years of life
  • A better start – improving the potential of young New Zealanders to have a healthy and successful life
  • Healthier lives – research to reduce the burden of major New Zealand health problems
  • High value nutrition – developing high value foods with validated health benefits
  • New Zealand’s biological heritage – protecting and managing our biodiversity, improving our biosecurity, and enhancing our resilience to harmful organisms
  • Our land and water – Research to enhance primary sector production and productivity while maintaining and improving our land and water quality for future generations
  • Life in a changing ocean – understanding how we can exploit our marine resources within environmental and biological constraints
  • The deep south – understanding the role of the Antarctic and the Southern Ocean in determining our climate and our future environment
  • Science for technological innovation – enhancing the capacity of New Zealand to use physical and engineering sciences for economic growth
  • Resilience to nature’s challenges – research into enhancing our resilience to natural disasters

They’re all worthy, but.

The trouble is, they’re just another ad-hoc add-on to a science and innovation system that has no clear idea of what we, NZ Inc, are trying to do, or of what particular piece(s) of a very large pie we should/could concentrate on.

At the same time (and I appreciate this is dirty-type talk) – these challenges don’t address where and how are we going to make more money for our country by clever use of R&D, and taking such new products and services to market?

There’s no connectedness between science and the economic health of our country. It means there a lack of relationships and countrywide partnering linking everything.

The NSC will achieve nothing. The public will have no more engagement with science, business is none the wiser, scientists will simply keep on keeping on.

Amongst comment, from my point of view, the best came from Prof Shaun Hendy – who was courageous enough to call a whole lot of nothing exactly that. Shaun’s a professor at Victoria University’s School of Chemical and Physical Sciences, as well as deputy director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology. He also a regular answer-provider on National Radio’s evening show. Original story is here.

“Of the 10 science challenges selected, only one really addresses one of the key economic challenges our country faces: namely the over-dependence of our economy on the primary sector,” he said.

“Our government invests far less in physical sciences and engineering than those of other small advanced economies, leaving our economy perilously exposed to volatile commodity markets.”

Having one of the challenges “simply aimed at making better use of physical science and engineering research is disappointing, given that we have just created a new organisation, Callaghan Innovation, to do exactly this”, Prof Hendy said.

Exactly.

We have MBIE, Callaghan Innovation, the Marsden Fund, these challenges – but no clear idea of what we’re doing.

Certainly is business as usual.


Problemsourcing initiative gets the academic once-over Peter Kerr Apr 24

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Open innovation and crowdsourcing are two relatively recent ways of finding solutions to (often) technical challenges experienced by companies.

There’s particular issues which need resolving when using the power of the crowd; along with the hope that someone has a usable answer.

Victoria (University) Business School in Wellington has, in the academic way that adheres to such publications’ rules, identified many of the pros and cons of open innovation and crowd sourcing in a hot-off-the-press paper recently published in ‘Technology Innovation Management Review’, see here.

Sally Davenport, Stephen Cummings, Urs Daellenbach and Charles Campbell have turned open innovation and crowd sourcing on its head with their paper and exploration; ‘Problemsourcing: Local Open Innovation for R&D Organizations’.

They’ve coined the term ‘problemsourcing’ – and given the rigour with which peer review is maintained – you have to presume they’re first.

“Problemsourcing is akin to crowdsourcing in reverse in that the open call initiator, not the crowd, holds the problem-solving capabilities, and the crowd-members offer not solutions but promising problems that would create substantial value if solved.”

The paper uses (the late) Industrial Research Ltd’s 2009 initiative ‘What’s Your Problem New Zealand’ as the model around which its authors explore problemsolving as a new open innovation practice – and in particular how the WYPNZ? competition for $1 million of research spending addresses eight key issues.
• Project delays
• Solution quality
• Ambiguous liability
• Temporary relationship
• Professional challenge
• Identity clash
• Exploitation and reputation effects
• Losers disenfranchised

The writers conclude that the success of WYPNZ? at this stage is measured primarily by the range of high-quality problems that were proposed as well as the sheer number of companies (in a small country) that, by submitting problems, indicated an interest in participating in such a process.

They point out: “With crowdsourcing, innovative activity is distributed somewhere in the crowd, but with problemsourcing, it remains firmly within the boundaries of the R&D organization, which we propose mitigates many of the risks and pitfalls associated with typical crowdsourcing initiatives.”

IRL ensured that its selected challenge had a fit with its own science and research resources, could make a difference to the country (and its economic health) and had a degree of sexiness (sticK, not Victoria Business School’s terminology) that would resonate with the general public and business alike. Resene Paints, and its wish to create a sustainable-base paint was the ultimate winner.

As Callaghan Innovation comes into being (and taking note of BusinessDesk journalist Pattrick Smellie’s recent article suggesting we give CI a chance to find its feet) the Davenport et al paper would be good reading for its people.

WYPNZ? was one of a number of IRL initiatives that lifted science and research beyond the white lab coat concept.

It spurred some companies which had never thought of R&D as a part of their business, to reconsider. It also brought (as the paper points out) many, many more partnering research opportunities IRL’s way.

WYPNZ? also dovetailed strongly, as you’d expect being its instigator, with IRL’s strengths.

But most of all it was fun.

And that’s an ‘f’ word we should allow ourselves, along with another one – failure.


The Power of Un-Location gets an airing Peter Kerr Apr 16

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Toby Ruckert of Unified Inbox had an interesting blog recently – demonstrating what he has called the Power of Un-Location.

(sticK had a blog on an earlier version of Unified Inbox here.)

For a brief period while in Shanghai, he (relatively unintentionally) went back in time 25 years or so, where he didn’t have a mobile phone or internet connection. In this he found quite a freedom.

Toby’s expressed many of the disconcerting pressures and issues that some of us have about always being connected, always feeling like you’re having to check in to see who has been checking in. I see some of the same in my own children and their relationship with Facebook, (I’m probably one of its worst users).

It is not difficult to see why some researchers believe that modern children are having their brains rewired differently to how older generations did – a result of all this immediate connectivity and ability to find an answer to any question straight away.

I thoroughly recommend a read of Toby’s blog. He articulates some excellent reasons for disconnecting for a little bit at least – not the least of which can be summarised as ‘sanity’.

There’s always a danger in considering the past to have been slightly more rosy-coloured than today, but he raises some good points in his discussion.

His blog also points to other examples of people reverting, at least temporarily, to a non-connected lifestyle.

I’m sure that in the not too distant future, doctors and others will thoroughly recommend, if not almost force, all of us to have a break from always being on. In the meantime, thanks Toby for highlighting the Power of Un-Location.


Lightning Labs shows off its first flowers of startup blooming Peter Kerr Apr 10

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Lightning Labs, a lean startup hub of selected neophyte companies located for three months on Wellington’s The Terrace, gave a ‘where we’re at, what we’ve learned’ quickfire talks recently.

The fullhouse (dozens on the waiting list), heard how the nine IT-oriented businesses are going, how they’ve changed and pivoted (or spivoted as Questo described their 360° return to where they began) and how they’re achieving product-market fit.

All are using the lean startup methodology and being heavily mentored in the expectation that many will attract new and additional investment at a formal pitch session Demo Day at Te Papa on May 15.

The nine startups, whittled down from an original 87 applications, have received up to $18,000 for the three month internship cum building platform. LL’s organisers, Dave Moskovitz, Creative HQ and many others describe it as being a means to build a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem across New Zealand, and have modified America’s TechStars model for Kiwi sensibilities.

Lighntning Lab is sponsored by CreativeHQ, MBIE, ninetwenty recruitment, The Wellington Company, Weta Digital, FX Netowrks, TradeMe and CityLink.

It is all part of, in sticK’s opinion, a maturing and reality check on the difficult feat of turning an idea into a product or service that someone will buy. That, or creating a fast-failure so an entrepreneur can get on with another project that does have market potential.

The three month intensive is divided into thirds (with participants currently halfway through):

· First month –validation & mentor bombardment (asking questions, testing hypotheses)
· Second month – build a structure
· Third month – prepare for investment….and beyond

One interesting feature, is a weekly group evaluation of everyone’s progress and ranking (which varies). This ever-changing ranking graphically shows how well teams are considered to be going.

For the record, the presentations and brief explanation of the startups are: (The companies and original market intent can be found here.

A point to note is the change in description of what the startups consider to be their market, and/or problem they’re solving).

Questo! – platform to connect parents and their children and share photos (in particular)

KidsGoMobile – a means to make children’s smartphone use safer by enabling parents to have an overview of who they’re connecting

withPromoki – a collaborative media project to use crowdsourcing to make and tell stories (particularly around brands)

Teamisto – social media platform for grass root sports teams, allowing them to interact with and provide value to local businesses that may wish to be sponsors

Expander – tracking and analytics platform to protect brands, first aimed at NZ food and beverage productsMyBuy – mobile marketing platform particularly aimed at SME’s

Publons – building a way for academics to publish articles without having to use a journal (publication)

WIP – cloud-based collaboration tool for film-making and editing

LearnCOACH – platform to allow one-on-one, conversational english tuition to non-english students

As programme director Dan Khan says, “the lean startup methodology is a set of very commonsense techniques.”

“What is also really important is the importance of a vision – defined in a way that allows a company, when pivoting, to remain within that vision,” he says.

To have such a vision, a company needs a good idea of what problem it is trying to solve, and that there’s a big enough pain point to provide a product that customers will love.

Roll on (and even role on) May 15 – the proof of the (investment) pudding for Lightning Labs first cohort of graduates!


Adding a hole lot of value to a piece of pine Peter Kerr Apr 04

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We all know that we’d prefer to export more than just a log of pine to overseas markets.

At the same time, the NZ Inc desire to add value to our raw commodities such as trees is almost tiresome through over-use.

So, it is a pleasure to be able to highlight a company and person doing something different and in their case, making a better pine pole.

Now TTT Products (and no, I’d never heard of them either until going through a recent exercise to maximise the return from a 20 year old four hectare block of pines that I’m involved with) isn’t a small firm. Its North Island headquarters at Tuakau covers 20ha, specialising in creating pine poles of many different sorts.

It may even seem to be a coals to Newcastle scenario, but TTT exports a fair number of these poles all around the Pacific and even to Europe and North America. This is partly because only pinus radiate (and Southern Yellow Pine) can take up the anti-insect, anti-corrosion chemical preservatives that then guarantee a longevity when buried in the ground.

However, the other clever product from TTT, partly ‘inspired’ by the recent Christchurch earthquakes, is what is called a MultiPole (and the basic focus of this blog)

It is a pole that’s actually a tube – TTT managing director John Reelick having perfected (and is keeping secret) a means to drill a long 50 – 150mm diameter hole in a pole. The pole is no weaker, and indeed, because the preservative chemicals can also be applied from the inside out, even more protected against rotting when in the ground.

What MultiPoles allow is a range of tools and complementary products such as cement or grout, that can be deployed because of this hole/tube.

For example, a water jet can be used to help clear the way and push the pole into the ground.

There’s a swag of engineering proofs and performance criteria, and Reelick and his team have further refined the MultiPole over the past couple of years.

Equally, the company’s demonstrating the versatility and application of poles as a modern building material for (rebuilding) Christchurch. They’ve built five storey offices, and a 15 storey model has also been proven as viable for the Garden City.

Which, is quite a lot of value-add for commodity, and an example of taking a raw material and making it work better.

Fantastic stuff all round. Keep up the good work TTT!

P.S.

The MultiPole appears to be a perfect, exportable, value-add product beyond a commodity. I’m sure John Reedick and his team have ideas they would like funding to research and perfect.

Callaghan Innovation has the mandate to be proactive – go give these guys a hand up.

They already know their market, and have a special product with, as IT businesses like to call it, a secret sauce (how to make the holes).

In the scheme of things, a very good CI investment bet for a multiple (or multipole in this case) return.


Dyed in the wool innovation partners up to go global Peter Kerr Apr 02

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The time it takes to convert a good idea into something that another person’s willing to buy is almost invariably longer than you think.

A couple of years ago, sticK reported on BGI Developments’ winning the right to commercialise AgResearch’s new textile fabric dyeing process.

The beauty of this process is different dye colours don’t bleed into each other – the picture or pattern remains sharp and embedded in the fabric (unlike say printing on top of a T-shirt for example).

BGI (stands for Bloody Good Ideas) directors Robyn George-Neich and Brent Gregory have spent part of the past two years looking for the right company to take the technology to the global market.

They now reckon they’ve found this key partner, American company Global Merino, San Anselmo, California headquartered.

George-Neich says the licenced technology allows designers to use merino in creative ways never before possible. This includes being able to choose colours and designs just before entering the market. Such flexibility of production reduces both the manufacturing and retailer risk.

BGI has spent the past year on commercial trials at Global Merino’s Melbourne facility, taking the innovation to commercial production.

Meanwhile, Global Merino report that their buyers’ responses to the new way of creating garments and graphics is “overwhelmingly positive”.

So, today the laboratory bench, tomorrow (or a few days after!), the world.

What this demonstrates is the value of partnership.

AgResearch’s mandate and strengths (these days) is not necessarily in commercialisation. That’s where BGI have come to the party. BGI doesn’t have the market depth or width to take the innovation to the world – that’s where Global Merino distribution is crucial.

BGI’s looking for other sectors of the textile market where the new dyeing technology can be applied, and AgResearch is trialling applications on wool in it various forms.

As George-Neich says, each of the parties would not be able to achieve alone what they can by working together.

She expects products made using the technology to be on shelves in 2014.

As a fusion of high performance and improved merino wool technologies and just-in-time fashion, this go to market model has a lot going for it.

Partnering, the right partnering, pays.


Kickstarting a San Fran Bay school science rap promotion Peter Kerr Mar 28

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You obviously can’t keep a science rapper down.

Tom McFadden, a Californian and Stanford biology lecturer among other things, completed a Masters in Science Communication at Otago University last year.

Under a Fullbright Scholarship and the moniker ‘Rhymebsome’ he toured a number of NZ schools promoting science and science education. The original sticK story is here.

Part of his Otago study was to:
1. Test the efficacy or effectiveness of a music-based video (for science)
2. Authorship, and the question of whether it is better to watch or make your own hip-hop song

Obviously there was enough proof of the value of communicating science through rap that McFadden’s launched a small Kickstarter project to fund five professional music videos by Middle Schools in the San Francisco Bay area.

McFadden’s also obviously a pretty competent utiliser of social media, because he contacted sticK to promote what he’s up to.

So here’s a plug for his Battle RAp Histories of Epic Science (or Brahe’s Battles). Brahe was also a 16th century astronomer who helped prove that Aristotle’s view of unchanging heavens was wrong (as McFadden comments in his Kickstarter ‘sale’ video.

As he says on the Kickstarter page: “Combining science, history, music and video is a powerful educational experience. When students are given the tools to create a video that is viewed around the world, it can be life-changing.”

The song/videos made by the five schools will explore important moments in science history, and once complete will be available to students and teachers to enliven science education around the world.

All sounds good for the comparatively low requested sum of US$11,865, which needs to be pledged by Tuesday April 16 to be kickstarted.

Go hard Tom. Anything that helps demystify science and make it cool(er) deserves a good rap.


Little school thinks bearly big Peter Kerr Mar 19

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“And the prize for the best use of social media and punching well above its weight goes to,”….drum roll….”Koputoroa Primary School”.

This 170 pupil country school, seven kilometres north of Levin on the Kapiti Coast deserves heaps of praise, alongside its key organiser Suzie Valentine, for a fundraising effort that literally wins the hearts and minds and wallets of people all over New Zealand.

How?

By organising a ‘send your Teddy Bear on holiday’ event, where (obviously much-loved) bears are sent to the school and photographed enjoying a holiday.

Promoted through social media such as Facebook, each bear has its own special passport. This year’s theme is to enjoy classic and vintage cars (and naturally have their photo taken in them), as several of the bears have been around for more than half a century.

As both a way of connecting with a wider audience, and demonstrating that distance is no longer an inhibitor in a highly connected world, the novelty and fund-raising concept is truly innovative.

Over 100 Teddy Bears are going on this year’s holiday, and the approximately $3000 raised will go to IT equipment for students.

A clever, innovative, first-mover idea that ticks so many of the right boxes….surely there’s a Hollywood movie angle there!


Creating a deep infrastructure tool and asset for Christchurch – a (relatively) cheap idea well worth NZ Inc considering Peter Kerr Mar 12

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Here’s an idea, so time topical it deserves much more thinking about by Christchurch, government and NZ Inc.

The Cement & Concrete Association of NZ’s (CCANZ) education and development manager Joe Gamman spoke at the recent Multicore World 2013 conference in Wellington. He’s been working alongside Callaghan Innovation on a potential ‘big data’ project for the past few months, and MW13 was, comparatively speaking, its first public airing. (Here’s the publicly available ‘Smart Idea’ project that received funding)

The general topic of his talk was around ‘Networked Infrastructure – Connecting Christchurch to the World’.

Dr Gamman’s pitch is to use the rebuilding of Christchurch as the world’s first test validation site for a ubiquitous sensing of the built environment. (Some of his presentation can be found here).

In other words, with standalone sensors able to be placed in any number of structures, buildings, roads, underground infrastructure (well, just about anything really), and the data about stresses, uses, traffic, changes over time (anything you want to measure) being collected, why not make this data available to the world.

What Dr Gamman sees being created is a piece of knowledge infrastructure; which only grows more valuable over time, and helps other people design new cities and improve old ones based on the learnings gained by having abundant infrastructure sensors as part of Christchurch’s rebuild.

“We have the opportunity to be high-touch as well as high-tech,” Dr Gamman says. “Such a curated data set would itself become an asset. A networked-Christchurch project would create a city where people will want to come to see what cities of the future will look like.”

Dr Gamman says there are a number of issues to address – not the least the legal framework around the data, who and how it can be accessed, and how it is protected.

Now, data security will become increasingly important as we develop an ‘internet everywhere’ society.

But security is just one component of an extremely good idea that would take advantage of the opportunity that Christchurch’s rebuild now provides.

Dr Gamman (and a hat tip to CCANZ for giving him the means to explore this idea) is now stress-testing the proposal, looking for corporate and government backers, and generally running the idea up the flagpole to see who salutes.

It is an idea, which, if implemented will benefit everyone, everywhere.

It will especially benefit Christchurch and provide huge economic spillover benefits for the city and New Zealand.

Gerry Brownlee, this would seem like a low-cost, high-profile and high return project that would be a real focal point in Christchurch’s rebuild.

As a government, National plays free and loose with the word ‘innovation’ – well here’s one that deserves a boost.


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