Yes Darren, finding the opportunities and selling the results is where I would like to think I come in - commercialising ideas, taking a concept and delivering and building the ability of entrepreneurs to work on as well as in the business is what gets me up in the morning and keeps me up at night

Keep up the dialogue team

I think we all agree that we have the ideas and I cannot argue with the fact that it is more the issue of ‘how’ and that it will be hard. If the process for this is finding opportunities->developing products->selling then I think we have the middle bit on track(maybe with some exceptions around capital). So then the hard bit for us is the bits that surround it. Finding opportunities and selling the result of our thinking (Ben sounds like where you come in?).

Certainly I would like to see more vision. Bitching about cost competition and the dollar isn’t a vision and there doesn’t seem to be a lot coming from government by way of yesterdays budget. Although I would stress that it is not governments job to set the vision but to merely support us in getting on with it.

New Zealand has a bright future as a producer of high-value niche product. I work with companies that are doing just that, but we need more. Lets get on with finding the opportunities and making the most of them.

Your raison d’etre is the one to have … I agree with you completely. Making things is a key mechanism for that and NZ is very good at this. The real questions are around the ‘hows’.

Thanks for your comments.

I do concede that the used of the phrase “very few” is overly provocative. You’re right, as is Ben, that there are many areas of opportunity for manufacturing.

I agree, there are a huge number of great ideas out there. The real effort is making the idea real and getting into the hands of your customers. Like you I come from a software background and I am used to rapid iterations of product in the hands of real users. Rule changing needs to take advantage of the rapid evolution of ideas. The pieces are already here to enable that but the attitude that I woke up to this morning was hidebound commentary about costs and an enumeration of issues that we as a country don’t have a hope in hell of controlling. What I would’ve like to have heard was an honest taking of responsibility and a little more vision. That vision needs to harness the rapid evolution of ideas and systems that allow that to occur (I know vision is hard when you’ve been kicked in the slats).

I am under not illusions about the simplicity … it will be hard. But I imagine it is no where near as hard as turning up to work one morning to discover that your job has been shipped offshore. The rewards though …

Excellent post! This is an area I am pretty close to. I just want to comment on a couple of your points.

“The traditional manufacturing model is broken”

Traditional manufacturing is broken (or at least it’s moved on), if you are competing purely on cost and you haven’t realized the rules have changed, then your future isn’t that bright.

“… there are now only very few areas where you can sustain-ably mash atoms on the edge of the world and move them 1000s of km to your market to sell them.”

I would argue that saying there are “very few” areas is wrong. I know there are a huge number of ideas and opportunities out there. There are a tonne of things that the ‘large’ manufacturers simply wouldn’t bother or know how to do.

If you look at someone like HP for example, their product development process uses a huge number of people with a big budget so the opportunity needs to have a payback to justify that. New Zealand has an ability and opportunity to do the opposite. We can see the opportunities that bigger players will miss. We can dream-up, design and build solutions to these problems and we can do it all for a lot less R&D outlay than the 1000 person team of a big player.This makes the opportunity a hell of a lot more attractive to us that them.

“we’ve just got to behave like Kiwis again”

I think that is a fantastic way to sum up the solution. Kiwis have developed a knack of finding solutions to problems and becoming pretty good at what we do. We have some fantastically innovative people in this country. We just need to get on with finding the opportunities, developing the solutions and taking these new, high value things to the world.

Darren

ben

My point is the former … NZ manufacturers need to find ways of being viable. They either find ways they can compete through the right sorts of raw products, a’la Icebreaker OR they start to deal with new processes.