By ELLEN READ
What happens when 450 invited guests sit in a conference room for 2 1/2 days, talking to each other and listening to 30 national and international speakers?
New Zealand will find out next week when the Catching the Knowledge Wave conference is held in Auckland from August 1-3.
Organisers hope the gathering will serve as a call to arms for those willing and able to help the country become part of the knowledge economy, and that practical ideas will flow with the rhetoric.
Sceptics, however, suspect it will be little more than a gathering of back-slapping pointy heads indulging in a mammoth talk-fest.
So who's right? And what's in it for the 3,844,450 - as of March 31- of us who won't be sitting in that conference room?
For a start, it seems fair to say that it will be one of the more heavyweight gatherings in New Zealand history. International speakers include John Seely Brown, the chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, writer Edward de Bono, Sean Dorgan, chief executive of Ireland's Industrial Development Agency and Professor Lord Winston, of TV series The Human Body fame. Representatives from the United Nations and OECD will also attend.
The conference aims to be a "national process of establishing consensus and gaining commitment for further action."
Grouped around five themes (innovation and creativity; people and capability; sustainable economic strategies; entrepreneurship; social cohesion and the knowledge divide) it plans to generate ideas and suggest ways to transform New Zealand into a knowledge society.
Conference co-chairman, University of Auckland vice-chancellor Dr John Hood, says: "We want to raise the level of debate and understanding across New Zealand. We don't think it is the conference's job per se to be utterly prescriptive, but by involving the various political parties on a bipartisan basis in the conference, we hope that they will go away with a lot more ideas and thoughts about the sort of things they can formulate their policies from in the future."
Dr Hood concedes there is the risk of a talk-fest - there will be a lot of talking, after all - but he hopes it will be structured in a useful way. "And we hope that it will over time result in the different people involved in the conference, directly and indirectly, being better informed about the things they do. It does have an action orientation in that sense."
Those involved with the conference - even some who were initially a bit cynical - seem to be excited about what it will do for the country.
CTU economist and conference committee member Peter Conway said the CTU had some worries about the event turning into an academic exercise because the union movement was not strongly represented. But he was optimistic, because the conference echoed themes picked up in many other organisations nationwide.
"It's all about trying to get improvement in terms of investment and skill," he said.
"We've got a huge stake in it because we are all about people having employability, meaning that they've got transferable skills. We don't see the problem as people's attitude to acquiring knowledge, so much as access and cost and quality."
The post-conference follow-up will determine its value to smaller firms.
"Inevitably at these sorts of conferences, there's not a huge number of new ideas. But there can be a bit more momentum put into a combined effort, particularly given that there's quite a broad cross-section."
Conference attender Maxine Simmons, executive director and founder of biotech company Immuno-Chemical Products, says the key will be whether the gathering will result in a common view of what needs to be done.
"But that's always a bit difficult, it's quite a challenging thing at a conference-type forum."
Ms Simmons, who is also a director of Industry New Zealand, the Foundation for Research Science and Technology and Biotenz, says the Government is ready to act if consensus is reached.
A preconference workshop, attended by representatives of the public and private sectors, did reach a consensus on some key initiatives which will be put before the conference. They include:
* The Government's signing a bilateral trade agreement with North America within two years.
* An immigration policy that achieves a well-integrated, high-talent population of five million by 2005.
* A business community commitment to increase private sector R&D expenditure, so that New Zealand is in the top 25 per cent of OECD countries.
* More business collaboration and sponsorship in education.
* Government targeting of literacy and numeracy in schools.
But if such proposals do emerge as the conference's ideas on how to catch the knowledge wave, what is the chance of the Government's implementing them?
Announcing the conference earlier in the year, Prime Minister Helen Clark - who co-chairs the event - said it built on themes of innovation and the knowledge society and sat alongside measures in the previous Budget, such as the venture-capital scheme, extended research and development grants, business "incubators" and centres of research excellence.
She said the Government would draft a "national innovation strategy" before the conference, and would feed recommendations from the conference into it.
That sounds encouraging but, as critics are quick to point out, to date the Government has been big on talk about the knowledge economy and working with business but - hamstrung by a lack of money and the reality of running a minority coalition - slow to transform words into deeds.
Business New Zealand head Simon Carlaw says the Government is up for the challenge which, as he sees it, boils down to the fact that annual economic growth of 7 per cent or better is needed for the country to prosper.
The steps taken so far are individually commendable but collectively do not come near the transformation that would sustain a First World income, he says.
This is the real issue for the Knowledge Wave conference.
The challenge for the Government was selling this core message, not to business, but to its own and other political ranks, and the wider community.
Mr Carlaw says the mere fact that the Government has thrown its weight behind the Catching the Knowledge Wave is "a further signal that the Government has regained its confidence in its relationship with business and is prepared to move beyond simple risk management."
Business will be watching to see if he is right.
* In Forum tomorrow: Professor Howard Frederick, director of Unitec's New Zealand Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Professor Martin Richardson, of Otago University's department of economics, will give their views on what the conference ought to achieve.
href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?reportID=57032">Catching the knowledge wave
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