Mark Elmore: Wired up for better global outcomes

In the Herald story Bedtime for the old No 8 wire romance (January 25), Michael Cullen and Jim Hopkins, in their own very different styles, highlighted the transformation between the New Zealand of yesteryear and the New Zealand of tomorrow.

The New Zealand of yesteryear was built on the mythology of the invention - the wonderful breakthrough by a person often working alone far from the mainstream.

It was a belief built on a view that the country needed simply to wait for the next home-taught genius to disappear into his shed and re-emerge with yet another world-beating product.

These days, it takes a lot more than a good idea and determination to make creating a world-beating product or service a reality.

In the IP-based, value-added world of the 21st century, it's critical that we shrug off outmoded beliefs about who we are and what we are capable of.

Economically speaking, New Zealand is now less in need of inventors and more in need of people with an understanding of what the world really wants and where our competitive advantages lie.

The Sir William Hamiltons have added immeasurably to the country in many ways, through inventions that were solutions to often uniquely New Zealand problems. For a long time, it's been a case of necessity being the mother of invention.

However, the necessity now has changed. No longer is it primarily about New Zealand solutions, but solutions to needs that exist globally. The simple fact is, we're in a global economy and we're as dependent on trade as any other country in the world.

The exciting thing is that, increasingly, we're showing that we're becoming adept at identifying and even sometimes creating these needs.

We're moving rapidly away from the more introspective No 8 wire solutions, to considering what it is that people from Berlin to Boston may actually want to buy.

Central to this is that in our economic vocabulary we are replacing the word inventing with designing. This means taking a more methodical approach to developing great products based on a deep insight of what excites customers and designing a product to meet that need.

Design is an outward-looking process, while invention tends to be more inward - a one-person solution meeting a need that may or may not have relevance to the world at large.

In late March, some of the world's leaders in design will be here for Better by Design 2005, a conference to help accelerate New Zealand's emergence into the design-led era.

The message they're bringing with them is well known to the Americans, the Scandinavians and the Germans, but less understood here.

It's that economic value comes from developing products and services where the thinking is led by design. Design that marks out products from competitors and which allows those products to command a price premium by arousing the passions of consumers.

These products need not represent earth-shattering breakthroughs of the sort that are dreamed of by the archetypal man in the shed. They're more likely to represent advances designed by observing how people interact with products and learning how to improve these experiences.

The exciting thing is that New Zealand now has a generation of businesspeople applying methodical design-led logic to develop niche products that delight people around the world.

Some are familiar names such as Formway and Orca; others are emerging brands such as OBO or Trimax Mowing Systems.

I'm proud to say that many of Fisher & Paykel's products including the Dish Drawer, can be included among New Zealand's emerging design-led products satisfying customers around the world.

And why is this happening? Our small domestic market is forcing ambitious companies to think globally by default.

We're also aware that our scale means it's ambitious to hope to compete with mass marketers from larger economies but we can, however, dominate international niche markets. And niche is where the real opportunities lie, often out of global brands' reach.

There's a lot to be excited about. But it's important to recognise that we're still in a transitional phase from the pioneering inventor mindset to the design-led approach.

The good news is that New Zealand's creative talents are being taken out of the shed and put on the world stage, and our inventors are being recast as designers. 

* Mark Elmore is the head of industrial design at Fisher & Paykel Appliances.