PIPE DREAMS
This guy is a st udent. He’s also a CEO. And an entrepreneur. And he’s not alone. Could universities f inally be producing a generat ion of Silicon Valley- st yle star t- ups?
Only the University of Auckland stood out for attention: it was named by MIT as one of the world’s five best emerging university-based entrepreneurial ecosystems.
IF YOU STARTED a wine technology company you’d want to call it something cool like Wine Grenade, wouldn’t you? Explosive by name, and hopefully explosive by nature, the company is set to burst onto the international wine-making scene and make Hamish Elmslie and his fellow founders wealthy young fellows.
It might also confirm that New Zealand is finally, finally, creating the kind of university spin- offs that we so covet in places like California’s Silicon Valley.
Wine Grenade started as a project within the University of Auckland’s Master of Commercialisation and Entrepreneurship programme. As part of their study, Elmslie and co were handed technology from crown research institute Plant & Food – a silicone valve that releases gases at a constant rate, and urged to find the best use for it.
The result, a micro- oxygenation tool for small wine-makers, is a text book case of commercialisation. The idea won University of Auckland's 2014 Spark $100k Challenge, gaining $25,000 in seed capital and six months gestation at The Icehouse business incubator.
The company also secured KiwiNet and government pre-seed funding to refine their prototype, and have agreement from some New Zealand winemakers to trial the tool for the 2015 vintage.
The plan is to take Wine Grenade to Australia and the US; the founders gained interest at a recent US wine fair from potential investors, distributors and winemakers.
Elmslie and his co-founders demonstrate a new breed of student eager to tap into university entrepreneurial ecosystems which are finally gaining momentum. Not before time. “In 1988 there was nothing,” says John Raine, head of AUT’s commercialisation arm AUTEL. Back then, Raine was head of engineering at Canterbury University and experimenting with the sort of commercial spin- offs he’d seen being done overseas.
“There was no venture capital, no seed capital or angel investors. There were no incubators, or any kind of support for early-stage companies, no chief scientist, few links between industry, universities and CRIs, few high tech startups, and no government schemes like the NZ Venture Investment Fund [NZVIF] or Seed CoInvestment Fund.”
“But things have evolved and we’ve reached a point that’s exciting. We’re still 15 to 20 years behind the USA on all this, but I’m greatly encouraged – it is finally happening.
KNOWLEDGE WAVE
It all seemed so exciting in 2001, when the Knowledge Wave conference set out an agenda for change. Universities and Crown Research Institutes were to become a key source of ideas and talent for the entrepreneurial sector. The knowledge economy was born.
But 14 years later, what’s to show? An MIT Skoltech Initiative report out last year identified limited success, with very few viable companies and a patchy effort at collaboration. Only the University of Auckland stood out for attention: it was named by MIT as one of the world’s five best emerging university-based entrepreneurial ecosystems.
The report said Auckland offered a blueprint for other universities worldwide operating in similar circumstances – cultures that don’t support entrepreneurship and innovation, are geographically isolated and/or have a lack of capital.