Yesterday October 4th saw the anniversary of Morris Yock’s trade marking of the jandal. The story of how Auckland businessman and his son Anthony began manufacturing the jandal in their garage in Te Papapa in 1957 is an interesting read and you can get in a nutshell on http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/timeline/4/10
I thought it interesting the Microsoft Outlook dictionary doesn’t know about jandals.
The day before, I had a leisurely Sunday morning breakfast with a dear and long time friend. We were at Shed 16, just off the motorway on Jesmond Road, Drury, south of Auckland. I must digress momentarily to tell you that unlike many places, their coffee was deliciously hot.
The rendezvous was also an opportunity to meet her new friend, a most interesting entrepreneur who is producing a portable building which folds up into a container for transport, then just unfolds again when located. We had seen these at the Mystery Creek Field Days and at a Homes Show in Auckland. http://www.habode.com/overview.html
Rod and I talked about getting great ideas off the ground. My interest of course is in building business cultures which encourage creativity and innovation. Rod’s perspective was of someone who actually does it!
In the back of my mind as we talked was a recent NZ Herald article, “New Zealand economy gets a C, must try harder.” [30 Sept 2010 / B4] The article by Owen Hembry noted, “The country is not a star performer and was often behind the average when compared with a peer group of OECD countries.” In fact, we were graded ‘D’ on Innovations and business sophistication, 20th of 31 peer countries. Really, that’s a terrible rating isn’t it?
New Zealand has an Economic Growth Agenda which encompasses six main policy drivers, one of which is supposed to be support for science, innovation and trade. You can read more about that on www.med.govt.nz
Why isn’t it working?
The discussion with Rod reminded me of the story I had heard before, especially when I chaired our local Economic Development Agency. There just isn’t the investment money around to get the new ideas off the ground. We know where that money went of course, into highly speculative and badly run finance companies all in the hope of ‘too good to be true’ returns. And now there is even less money available to invest in our economic development as the Government bales out the failures – all good capital straight down the long, dark and unproductive drain hole.
As Rod and others like him have said, nobody really wants to know you, and the Ministry of Economic Development is no exception, until you have an obvious success on your hands, and then the few investors around want your soul as part of the deal.
In my view, that’s hardly a culture which encourages creativity, innovation, or economic development.
