Our stories
Yarns of wisdom at Maths Craft Festival
Armed with knitting needles and crochet hooks, Drs Jeanette McLeod, Julia Collins and Phil Wilson are on a mission to bring maths to the masses. The trio are behind Te Pūnaha Matatini's Maths Craft Festival, running at the Auckland Museum on the weekend of September...
Reframing Innovation: conversations from around the web
Did you miss our Reframing Innovaton campaign with Figure.NZ? Catch-up on the conversation from around the web with our Storify: [View the story "Reframing Innovation" on Storify] Want to find more about telling stories with data? Sign up for a Figure.NZ account and...
Cate Macinnis-Ng receives Plant Biology award
Congratulations to new Associate Investigator Dr Cate Macinnis-Ng who recently received the Roger Slack Award in Plant Biology. The annual award by the New Zealand Society of Plant Biologists recognises an outstanding contribution to the study of plant biology in the...
Māori Knowledge & Development Panel Forum
He aha te kai a te rangatira? He Kōrero, he kōrero, he kōrero. Nō reira, nau mai, haere mai! You are warmly invited to attend a PBRF forum focused on the Māori Knowledge & Development Panel led by Professor Margaret Mutu and Dr Aroha Harris. The forum is: Aimed at...
The (my) future and other predictions with greater than 5% error
What are you going to do after you finish your PhD? Where do you want to go? Are you going to become a lecturer? These are all questions that I field on a regular basis. Rather than going with my instinctive response of “What the hell? I don’t even know what my PhD is...
Innovation & R&D spending – a data-driven conversation
In my post on Monday, I looked at New Zealand’s research and development spending. The R&D dollar is just one of the proxies used to try to understand innovation and while it is certainly an important input to the innovation process, it is possible that our low...
Navigating the jagged rocks and journeying through the looking glass
A case and a space for diversity and connectivity - reframing innovation in New Zealand read time / 25 mins Thinking about how we might reframe innovation in the New Zealand context, and using data available from Figure.NZ to do so, has given me pause to consider...
He aha te mea nui?
This blog looks at reframing innovation in the context in which most of my research in the last decade has been – transforming Māori communities. Some scene setters: The Māori Economy is estimated to be worth $42.6 billion (BERL Report, 2013). The Ture Whenua Māori...
At risk youth or innovative resourceful youth?
I wonder what was the most difficult thing you learnt in the last three months? Recently I went on a family trip to the USA. It was the first time I had travelled outside Aotearoa New Zealand in 18 years. Everything had changed. The Visa was online. The passport...
Innovating the New Zealand education system
Innovation. This word has been thrown around a lot lately. In a recent guest lecture at the University of Waikato, I spoke about innovation being a mix of creativity, serendipity and courage. New Zealand is uniquely qualified for all three of these attributes so it...
How grassroots innovation turned around the youth vote after decades of decline
“The rules are made by the people who turn up” - that was one of many slogans for the RockEnrol campaign in 2014. Why? Because we had learned that when it came to voting for the rulemakers, 3 out of 5 young Kiwis weren’t turning up.[i] Young people make up 20% of the...
Interesting things that I learned
When Shaun Hendy offered me the chance to write a blog for this project, I jumped at the opportunity. I have been working for interesting and innovative organisations who trade in knowledge for over 10 years, and before that I was a patent examiner – so the...