Innovation Opportunities for Sustainable Action

Vic Crone, CEO of Callaghan Innovation

Callaghan Innovation is very involved with protecting our natural capital with environmental technologies. We focus on changes in industries, such as agriculture and fisheries, making our organisation a natural fit for the Circle’s collaboration. As a country, we have a finite number of resources, and the Circle’s focus on collaboration among companies within a sector, and how resources are being used, is very compelling to us.

I was drawn to protecting our country's natural capital as, like many Kiwis, I feel connected with our native bush. The warning signs we are seeing, in emissions as well as the number of species that are becoming extinct, are distressing. But I’m also seeing a positive shift, with organisations addressing these issues with people-planet-profit models and working more holistically in the way they relate to the environment.

Innovation plays a substantial role in enabling climate action change. Every single industry is affected, and all the new technologies that are emerging to solve these pressing problems are hugely opportune. We are needing to utilise big data and the internet further, putting sensors through every industry, from our buildings, roads, seas, and lakes, so we can measure our natural resources in real-time. We need to be measuring the level of degeneration across all areas, as well as the impacts our initiatives are having to reduce them.

We’ve been supporting Victoria University Robinson Research Institute, which is looking into the innovation of materials. They have developed an initiative to produce steel with zero emissions, as well as recycling minerals and resources with no emissions at all.

We’ve also been supporting other organisations which focus on extracting minerals out of land cycle resource waste. Also, a large project within the fishing industry is addressing the challenges of the amount of fishing our country is undertaking and minimising waste with innovation technology. Projects are also focusing on wastage and reutilising it, extracting everything out of it, rather than just wasting it.

Innovation plays a role everywhere to help better produce materials with fewer carbon emissions and manage and measure in real-time the environmental impact.

Utilising innovation technology to be able to measure these initiatives in real-time is hugely beneficial, allowing change to be made faster. Driverless cars, for example, have multiple sensors and cameras in the car that are monitoring and reacting in real-time, with an ability to collect data over time. It’s not only the sensors but the technology in cameras which provides another kind of depth of what data you can capture and measure. Combining this with machine learning and big data allows a whole other level of insight available.

As a country, we must get more of our industry aware of these opportunities, and we need to up-skill, not only from New Zealanders but also by importing more skills as currently there isn’t enough. We can then apply all this incredible technology to really get the benefits out of it.

We’ve produced a Clean Tech climate report which focuses on where New Zealand could be in the sustainability space. These ambitions are built off a very high level of renewable energy in the country, as compared to many countries we are off to a good start. There’s also an opportunity for us to transition and start this in other industries.

As a country, we have previously been very successful with individual organisations developing products and services and either selling them in New Zealand or taking them to the world. However, this is not what the future looks like, and we do need to be doing better collaborating to achieve systems change.

As we move to further complexity in the world, we can’t solve all of this, or even keep across all of this, individually anymore, so we really need to be collaborating more. Collaboration starts with a shared vision, purpose, values, or behaviours, which once multiple organisations have agreed upon, then the platform is set for great collaboration.

What we often do as a country is find one or two common activities that we want to do, which we might achieve, but that doesn’t set up long-term collaborative partnerships. It is quite foreign for some industries to collaborate in the ways that are being suggested because they are used to being hugely competitive.

We have got to remember that we are a tiny part of the world, which creates opportunities for our organisations, and we can’t solve these things on our own. We need to also be collaborating globally to solve some of these sustainability issues. The upside is immense for businesses that are operating in this space, and the upside in the next decade is huge.

We also need to improve the organisational capability to tackle some of these challenges. This is where diversity plays a role because we are moving towards an intersection between a competitive-collaborative model, so getting more diversity in organisations to bring in more collaboration is important.

There is a range of upskilling required. Organisations need to be far more proactive in mapping their eco-system and where they are going to be able to partner, joint venture or buy these technologies because they are not going to be able to develop them all themselves.

Over the last five years, a broader range of entrepreneurs are emerging, with many focused-on profit and purpose. Ambition is high around solving these challenges at a global level.

International businesses are approaching us wanting to do pilots and trials in New Zealand because we have a good reputation globally due to our energy sustainability. The challenge we have is that we are not as collaborative as we need to be, so often some of those tend to fall over because we don’t have that strong collaboration mindset.

The Circle set up as a public-private partnership is critical. There is real strength in both sectors, and as we are talking about huge global problems, the view that one or the other can solve it on its own is misguided. There are ways of working to solve that, as well tools like innovation processes and agile human-centred design. We can bring these tools to collaborate better and tackle these issues.

We are not going to solve this unless sectors come together. It means that innovation needs to be in the private sector also, not just the big organisations, but the organisations that are building the solutions to solve some of these problems. The sectors also think differently, which is a great opportunity to encourage diversity. Collaboration and diversity are critical in effecting change.

We simply won’t have a planet left if we don’t do this, and the opportunity is here for us to show that our global leadership is strong. As a country, we do face barriers and challenges to New Zealand’s systemic problems. We have great ideas, but we don’t yet know how to scale them at a global level, while we are getting better at it, there’s a huge opportunity to strengthen in this space. Our cultural nature is to “do it ourselves”, so we often go at this on an individual basis. However, there are huge opportunities in how we can overcome our systemic culture and shine in this area.