Brian Fallow of the New Zealand Herald reports on a paper from the New Zealand Institute which says that the solution to New Zealand’s poor levels of innovation isn’t simply to spend more money on research and development.
The Institute says that investment into R&D will be largely wasted unless attention is paid to the commercialisation and business development of any R&D products.
An excerpt: (read in full here)
“The institute argues that the productivity of New Zealand’s scientific institutes, and of the commercialisation units which link them to the world of commerce, could be improved.
“”We need to get from small isolated research units to larger, integrated ones which are well networked internally, to capture synergistic benefits, and externally, so that they know what is going on in the wider world,” Boven said.
“”We are talking about an evolution to at-scale, world class institutions with a focus on where New Zealand’s economic endowments give the opportunity to build a cadre of successful businesses.””