Economy suffering tech trend blindness
Three months in, Callaghan Innovation boss Victoria Crone is convinced her job is the perfect combination of technology and politics.
In her first 100 days, the former Auckland mayoral candidate met 200 Callaghan customers to find out what they needed and wanted to be able to be more innovative.
She said it solidified her vision of encouraging firms to invest in research and development, building business confidence and beefing up the commercialisation of ideas to take overseas.
But New Zealand still had its head in the sand and could not yet grasp what the future of technology would look like, Crone said.
‘‘We have got some great pockets of innovation [but] you could not call us an innovative economy that is prepared for the next decade.’’
If New Zealanders could foresee tech trends, they could create more Xeros, Crone said. Crone was Xero’s New Zealand managing director from 2014 until early 2016.
She said New Zealanders lacked an understanding of how technology would impact staff, skills, leadership and business models.
People needed to retrain and upskill to be prepared for half of today’s jobs to disappear and for new jobs to be invented, she said.
Artificial intelligence and robotic automation would make skills such as creativity, empathy, problem solving and critical thinking more important.
Crone said the Government was not exempt from the changes coming and she wanted it to think about the implications the future would have on the economy.
She accepted the challenge for Callaghan to practise what it preached, adding that Callaghan was the intercept between businesses and Government, but it did not act like one or the other.
‘‘We cannot ever make our customers happy if we act like what you would stereotype as a traditional government department … I remain as excited if not more excited about the opportunity that is here … We can do things now that we never could have hoped to have done before.’’ ❚ The Fairfax Media innovation series runs in partnership with Callaghan Innovation.