Events aim to encourage university researchers and companies to start talking to each other.
Question: How do you get the country's eight universities to co-operate? Answer: Turn off the funding tap.
That was the gist of a cheeky crack last week from entrepreneur, scientist and former New Zealander of the Year Sir Ray Avery, at an event showcasing the fruits of university R&D. It got a good laugh, both from the academics in the audience, who included event host Derek McCormack, vice-chancellor of AUT University, and representatives of businesses.
Avery, whose Mt Eden garage is the wellspring of a string of world-changing products, has the perfect credentials to inspire academia and the commercial world to work together. He urged the gathering to help haul the country up the international innovation index, from our position at No 26, behind chocolate-maker Belgium.
It was the sixth in a series of 14 get-togethers between the universities and business. The seventh took place last night, over the road at the University of Auckland, and they'll end in June at Mystery Creek.
The AUT event introduced representatives of companies such as Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, New Zealand Aluminium Smelters, Kiwi Yachting Consultants and Pumpkin Patch to high-tech manufacturing opportunities emerging from university science and engineering departments. Yesterday's University of Auckland session focused on the biotechnology industry, and still to come are agritech, Maori business and ICT, among others.
When it's all over, the universities will count the new contacts made and sit down with the Tertiary Education Commission, which funded the exercise, to decide whether it was worthwhile.
This isn't exactly speed dating. The incubation period for new ventures can be anything from three months to a year and, since the first match-making session last May, one product - a robot that cares for the elderly - has come out of the process.
"Quite a few others" are under contract negotiation, says event co-ordinator Anna Hamilton-Manns, the national director of Uconz (University Commercialisation Offices of New Zealand), but the parties are reluctant to open up until deals are done.
The short-term measure of success is how many new faces show up for the free drinks and nibbles and to tour the university stands. On that basis, the 60 new company names garnered at AUT were a good result.
Whether many are equipped to exploit the sophisticated technology the researchers were exhibiting is another question. Viclink, representing Victoria University's MacDiarmid Institute, was drumming up interest in applications for the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) developments of its Magritek spinout company.
Magritek, whose founding director is 2011 New Zealander of the Year Sir Paul Callaghan, has shrunk the same room-size instruments used for medical imaging into portable devices that can scan objects as diverse as rocks and paintings, revealing what lies beneath the surface.
Waikato University's Chronoptics group, meanwhile, is working on a 3D imaging system with potential security applications. Adrian Dorrington, the lead developer of the technology, says it is similar to the Microsoft Kinect motion-sensing accessory released last year for the Xbox 360.
Microsoft sees such systems taking the place of the computer keyboard and mouse, and has bought Canesta, a company Chronoptics has been working with. That could see Chronoptics playing a part in future Microsoft product development.
But it wouldn't preclude Chronoptics striking deals with local companies, Dorrington says.
Seeding commercial ventures with ready-made ideas is one way the universities can work with business. Another approach, which Grant Dick of the University of Otago's information science department was touting, is to undertake research to order. That's the kind of science Avery encourages.
"We have more research papers published per head of population than any other country but we have less products hitting the market," Avery said. In contrast, his starting point is to take a real-world problem and use science to find a solution.
Working that way around he has developed an intraocular lens for treating cataracts and an intravenous drug flow controller, and is working on an infant incubator for developing countries.
His latest product, a predigested protein formula that "will revolutionise infant nutrition", is the result of a happy marriage of the academic and hands-on. While he worked on it for thousands of hours in his garage, a Massey University scientist with whom he had a chance encounter was proving the absorption properties of the formulation.
"He had clinical evidence that it actually worked; radio nucleotide labelling that showed this was the first protein molecule in the world that was 100 per cent absorbed across the gut and 100 per cent absorbed into muscle tissue.
"That marriage is going to result in a multimillion dollar, if not billion-dollar, industry of waste products that we can turn into products the feed the world."
That should be enough to persuade any reluctant couple to tie the knot.
Could Do Better
Rankings on the International Innovation Index*
1. Singapore
2. S. Korea
3. Switzerland
4. Iceland
5. Ireland
6. Hong Kong
7. Finland
8. United States
9. Japan
10. Sweden
22. Australia
26. New Zealand
* Developed by Boston Consulting Group, based on factors such as govt support, businesses' investment in R&D, and the results, in the form of high-tech exports and intellectual property.
Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist
