Tauranga ICT Innovation Centre

What a Tauranga ICT Innovation Centre could look like...

Since I returned to New Zealand three days ago, I have heard from more than one person about the prospects of an ICT Innovation Centre in Tauranga. Members of the BOP ICT Cluster are being surveyed on their views and a number of local agencies appear to have bought into the potential. So here is my quick take.

If the idea is to build a modern facility with a large pipe and pack it with a spectrum of local IT related businesses, it probably will not work. That is not what ICT Innovation Centres do. To understand this, you could do better than to visit the Waikato Innovation Park in Hamilton. I am actually there on Monday. Now that in my view is what an Innovation Centre is all about.

Waikato Innovation Park is New Zealand’s growth hub for Ag-Biotech businesses. This is where leading primary sector science, technology and research meets the catalyst of entrepreneurship in the form of the Park's 50 resident companies. Its proximity to the University of Waikato campus provides the scientific and academic input into the Park's available research pool.

It is a model that the architects behind the Tauranga ICT Innovation Centre should consider. They need to identify vertical sectors within the ICT space and map those against available academic research partners. By providing a research hub of this type, a Tauranga ICT Innovation Centre could become a Centre of Excellence attracting companies, researchers and investment from outside the region.

That's my quick take. No doubt, more detail later.

Innovation Centre in Tauranga?

A short stroll from the Strand

So the news that a new Innovation Park might be built as part of a redevelopment of the Sulphur Point site in Tauranga has finally become public.

The Bay of Plenty Times reported a couple of days ago that draft plans were to be submitted as part of the consent process to the relevant authorities. This is great news.

For some time, Priority One has been working with the developers to scope out a high tech centre at this location. It will provide a base for local software companies and hopefully attract more similar businesses from outside the Bay. Tauranga needs high quality and well connected office accommodation to build its 'weightless' economy base. From London, the timing of this announcement could not have been better.

Tauranga Innovation Park

Waikato Innovation Park, Hamilton

I have just returned from Waikato Innovation Park in Hamilton. It is my fourth trip in six weeks.

Waikato Innovation Park has been established from a public/private partnership to enhance Waikato economic growth by strengthening Innovation in the region's world leading Agritech and Ag-Bio sectors and is currently home to over 50 companies.

The Waikato is already the country's leading location for science research, with approximately 1000 research scientists working in Hamilton, giving the city one of the highest ratios of scientists per capita in the world. A quarter of the research undertaken in New Zealand occurs in Waikato organisations. Hence my recent trips.

Hamilton has one big advantage over Tauranga. Hamilton has a University; Tauranga does not. That fact hurts businesses in Tauranga / Bay of Plenty. It is a situation that has to be addressed.

My own take on this is that Tauranga, as the one of the fastest growing cities in New Zealand, should do a deal with the University of Waikato. Up-front and now. I've heard the talk. It's time to do the walk. So in election month, this is my Manifesto.

1. Make land available at Windermere on the outskirts of Tauranga to enable the University of Waikato to build a campus.

2. Focus on a core area of research activity. Let's call it 'ICT'.

3. Build the Tauranga Innovation Park and attract a cluster of private companies to it. Locate it adjacent to the campus and create active engagement between the research scientists and the commercial sector. Build great, innovative businesses and throw in a free surf board to remind them that they are only minutes from the Mount's Main Beach.

Now I'll vote for that.