About the project

Explore the goals, methods, and insights of the Building New Zealand’s Innovation Capacity project.

Associate Professor Katharina Ruckstuhl giving a presentation to group of seated people — Associate Professor Katharina Ruckstuhl giving a presentation to Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall.

    Snapshot    This unique study evaluates how Science for Technological Innovation (SfTI) researchers and external stakeholders collaborate on projects, with the insights gained capable of boosting innovation performance.
The aim is to understand what works best in the Aotearoa New Zealand context, evaluate the effectiveness of our work, and learn from it as we go.
Research results are continuously fed back, enabling SfTI leadership and the science system in general to learn from the research team’s findings.
International benchmarking will compare SfTI innovation processes and management to best practices around the world.
The research represents the first significant examination of how researchers interact with Māori businesses or organisations, and how cultural capacity is built in the innovation ecosystem.

Strengthening Aotearoa New Zealand’s innovation capacity

Aotearoa New Zealand is falling behind many other OECD countries in research and development investment. In response, the government aims to cultivate a more productive and cohesive innovation ecosystem.

Experts believe that increased spending on fundamental and applied research in the public sector and private businesses is part of the solution, but research suggests that human and relational capacity—the skills and attributes that researchers possess and their ability to work in productive networks—may be equally important in driving innovation.

Researchers from the Science for Technological Innovation (SfTI) National Science Challenge (NSC) are putting this to the test by examining how researchers and industry partners interact across all of SfTI's projects over a ten-year period.

This project is the first long-term study of its kind in the New Zealand research system. It is even more significant because it looks at how cultural capacity—appropriate ways of collaborating with Māori organisations—may also enhance human capacity.

Measuring capacity to innovate—how does it work?

The research is based on the concept of 'open innovation', which tests the belief that valuable enterprises need to acquire, assimilate, and exploit knowledge from both internal and external sources. However, the capacity of New Zealand's research groups to connect with companies, industries, and Māori organisations for commercialising their science and innovation is not well understood.

This spearhead project—Building New Zealand’s Innovation Capacity—aims to provide new insights through observational and real-time case studies that examine the efficacy of SfTI's research processes and industry engagement. The project includes parallel case studies of co-innovation projects between SfTI researchers and Māori organisations since the Māori economy has distinctive features.

The research findings are shared with the wider science community on an ongoing basis, so that the innovation ecosystem can learn from SfTI's work.

A unique approach to increasing innovation

This project is an unprecedented effort in Aotearoa New Zealand to understand how researchers and industry can work together to innovate, and to point the way forward for more productive collaboration that could boost our collective R&D efforts.

It uses SfTI’s own research projects as a window into the innovation process, analysing progress and providing insights to SfTI leadership and the wider innovation ecosystem.

In this way, the project's benefits are felt well before its conclusion. The project has the potential to enhance the Māori economy by undertaking the first significant analysis of the interaction between New Zealand’s physical science and engineering researchers and Māori businesses.

As the project progresses, its researchers will continue their quest to identify the critical factors at an individual researcher level, organisational level, and within the science system more broadly. This will help New Zealand unlock the real potential in its innovation ecosystem.

Project background information

The spearhead project was suggested by the Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment Science Panel in the early stages of the SfTI NSC.

In view of SfTI's mission to enhance Aotearoa New Zealand's capacity to use physical sciences and engineering for economic growth and prosperity, the project was considerably expanded in the proposal development phase.

The cross-disciplinary research team, which is aimed at designing a specific research project to study SfTI's approach to mission-led research and capacity development processes, consists of 50% Vision Mātauranga innovation researchers.