Dialogue: Being unique and pushing boundaries key to success

New Zealand's old pioneering spirit is the key to technological prosperity, says computer innovator SIR GIL SIMPSON*.

New Zealand's much heralded No 8 wire heritage is a fallacy. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes innovation, and what built our once great reputation for scientific discovery.

The secret to New Zealand becoming a successful technology nation is not rushing into the future with No 8 wire fixes, but looking back into our history and understanding where we came from. Havelock at the turn of the 20th century is a good place to start.

Havelock would not normally be cited as the epicentre of scientific discovery in New Zealand, but it was this pretty little town, situated at the foot of Kenepuru Sound at the top of the South Island, which helped to produce two of our greatest innovators - Lord Ernest Rutherford and Sir William Pickering.

That Havelock, the self-proclaimed greenshell mussel capital of the world, could foster the brilliance of a Rutherford or Pickering had nothing to do with elaborate national strategies or Government grants, but something deeper and more intrinsic - who they were as New Zealanders. It is something we have lost, along with our ability to be real innovators.

Rutherford, famed for pioneering modern atomic physics with his work at the turn of the 20th century, and Pickering, one of the technical masterminds behind the American victory in the space race of the 1960s, are truly from another era.

They both epitomised New Zealand's pioneering spirit, the ability to reject everything that had gone before and create something completely new and quite different. Theirs was a spirit born of a unique combination of the tangata whenua and British settlers.

Maori were the original pioneers, fearless explorers who challenged existing maritime technology to reach New Zealand's shores hundreds of years previously. The settlers were escaping the class strictures of Victorian-era governments and endured incredible hardship to build a life in New Zealand.

This combination gave our forefathers a hunger for exploration, to prove what New Zealand was, to prove that it was a great nation.

It was crucial to the success of Rutherford and later Pickering, as well as many others - the likes of flying genius Richard Pearse, mathematician Alexander Aitken and world-renowned biochemist Allan Wilson.

These uniquely New Zealand attributes were summed up by Wilson's friend Charles Laird after his death: "I have wondered about the parts of his personality that were so unusual even among first-rate scientists. His courage, his openness, his ability to focus on a problem and not let go. His special vision to see the final experiment and not to get distracted by intermediate ones and the details in between.

"Where did these traits come from? Do we learn them? If so, can we learn them as young adults, or teach them to our children and students? Or do we have to learn them from our parents when we are young?"

These traits were intrinsically part of New Zealand, but have been steadily eroded in recent decades, diminishing our ability to be innovators.

We often congratulate ourselves on being innovative, but real innovation is about succeeding by being different, seeing what others do not.

Much of our technological success in recent years tends to be improvisation - our ability to cleverly make do with what is already around, rather than make fundamental new discoveries.

The No 8 wire heritage has been a historical progression. New Zealanders were first pioneers, then innovators, and have now become improvisers. To be a technology success in the future, we need to go back to the past, to rediscover our pioneering spirit, to get back to that sense of exploration and to that feeling of being on the edge of the world.

It is not about going back to the 1900s, but trying to recreate that pioneering attitude in a way that fits with the New Zealand of today - one that reflects all of the cultures that make up our country and the world in which we live.

Unless we can recapture some of this pioneering spirit we will fail to contribute technologically to the world.

Is this necessarily a problem? It is if we want to hold our own in the world, to stay a First World nation.

The recent wharf dispute in Southland and Nelson is an interesting microcosm. Mainland Stevedoring won the contract to unload those Carter Holt Harvey ships mainly on the strength of its superior computer system, which made tracking logs and loading the ships more efficient and reliable. Their people weren't necessarily faster, stronger or smarter, but they were superior on the basis of the technology they were using.

On a world scale, this is New Zealand v Canada, or Australia, the United States or Britain.

So how can New Zealand rediscover its pioneering roots and become a true technology nation?

The first requirement is to reject some of our prevailing ideologies and institutions. Rebuild important parts of our nation. Eradicate the mind control of political correctness that hampers our policy-makers, weakens our education system and suffocates the Rutherfords, Pickerings or Pearses in our midst.

We need to question why we have a society that encourages our young people to be lawyers and accountants rather than scientists and philosophers. Maybe we need to create a new institute of learning outside the existing system, one that values the pioneering spirit over anything else.

First of all, we need a debate - a debate that calls into question our approach to education, to social welfare, to taxation and so on, with a view to rediscovering New Zealand.

We have the capability to be phenomenally successful. We just need to get back to those pioneers, to that ethos which pervaded sleepy Havelock more than a century ago.

* Sir Gil Simpson is the founder and chief executive of Aoraki Corporation, a Christchurch-based international software company.

Herald Online feature: Common core values

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