Australian Worldwide Exploration
Key Innovation: Australian Worldwide Exploration puts IT to work to help it find buyers for oil from the offshore Tui field, which in the first year of production was worth about $2 billion.
Forming a design process
Apple, Icebreaker, Fisher & Paykel, Dyson, Formway … it’s design that lifts these companies — and their profits — above the ordinary. But how do you encourage your company to become design-led? A survey of the best-designed companies finds four key qualities that they have in common
Rasika Versleijen-Pradhan – Senior Analyst IT Services IDC
The Collaborative CxO: Today, organisations spend a significant proportion of their IT budgets on storing, governing and securing their corporate data. In all these efforts, it is often forgotten to capture and leverage the business value of their corporate intellectual property. Enhancing the value of information by turning it from just 'noise' into knowledge, however, is the crux for the creation of strategic advantage.
Ideas for peanuts...
Ideas are free—and ideas people can be bloody cheap too. Gena Tuffery looks behind the corporate façade and meets the creative interns getting by on company handouts and whatever’s left in the fridge.
Standing on the backs of giants? Watch out you don't fall
You've got a hot new idea for a product or service that will slot neatly into an existing infrastructure. You can create it quickly and build on someone else’s audience. But are you living on borrowed time? Will your carefully developed and devised offering survive, if it piggybacks on someone else’s service and is at the mercy of business decisions that you have no influence over?
Going medical, virtually
Holding the balance of life and death in your hands isn’t a game—except when it is. New Zealand-based GoVirtualMedical has finally replaced the medieval med-student practice of practicing on a prone body with a professional multimedia version of the battery-powered board game, Operation.
Physical? That's old school
Who would have thought that infrastructure was the most interesting part of the Internet? Welcome to cloud computing, where big pipes and big iron create a second—no, third—generation of Internet entrepreneurs. Matt Cooney asks: could New Zealand become the land of the long net cloud?
Finally, a nurse who truly has no qualms about changing bedpans: a robot
If the idea of R2D2 changing your bedpan isn’t appealing, you can be sure it’s one job that nurses won’t miss. It’s just one of the tasks that a robo-nurse is being designed to do in a collaboration between the University of Auckland and local artificial intelligence experts at Robot-Hosting.
Looking on the outside, to improve on the inside
Even companies with great ideas usually don't know how to analyse them. Bill Wilmot makes sure ideas get scrutinised - ruthlessly. Here's how he helps kill bad ideas and give great ideas a tune-up
Animation studio's computers bring doodles to life
Key Innovation: Huhu Studios uses New Zealand's reputation as an international leader in digital animation to go from producing a TV series for local consumption to making feature films for an American distributor.
Rebuilding infrastructure drives overseas sales
A fast growing Kiwi company is driving its overseas sales thanks to a 'whole company' approach to rebuilding its infrastructure.
Joint research from IBM and the University of Auckland
New research reveals that the rate of innovation in New Zealand has been stagnant for almost a decade - which has to be a worry for a nation seeking a step-change improvement in economic growth.
Going a round (or two) with Kevin Roberts
North & South magazine once facetiously asked if Kevin Roberts was God. Others just thought he talked too much, and plenty regard his Lovemarks books as too eeerk for words. But after 850,000 book sales and 11 years in As Saatchi & Saatchi global CEO, Roberts is still winning business, singing the praises of New Zealand, and seeing love and rugby everywhere. Vincent Heeringa talks to the world’s most irrepressible optimist, starting with why he’s right and Vincent is 850,000 times wrong
Made OF New Zealand, Made IN China
Although its name suggests serenity, there’s nothing calm about St Lukes Shopping Centre in Auckland. That concrete retail rotunda heaving with people lugging kids, groceries and chain-store bags jammed with stuff? Yeah, that’s the one.
Rhubarb Zoo is proving that animation is pure adult’s play
Who would have thought that infrastructure was the most interesting part of the Internet? Welcome to cloud computing, where big pipes and big iron create a second—no, third—generation of Internet entrepreneurs.Matt Cooney asks: could New Zealand become the land of the long net cloud?
Following the Unsustainable Path
CIO's and Executives alike, agree that today's business operations are heavily dependant on technology. Supposedly "simple" business requests such as up-scaling IT production, changes in business processes to meet customer demands or to achieve productivity gains, and the integration of new/existing services, often reach the boundaries of organisations' IT abilities.
Two Wellington entrepreneurs have rocketed to success in just 18 months - doing for manufacturing what desktop publishing did for the printing industry.
Breaking third world poverty, with first world money and smart ideas
It takes a Kiwi to think of something this nutty. Take left-over meat from New Zealand abattoirs, mix it with unwanted kiwifruit pulp, dry the result, package it into a sachet, and then sell it as super-food to the world’s poor and starving. Oh, and as a sideline, flog the sachets at a premium to Californian body builders.
Linking genius and insanity
Throw away your de Bono, ignore your critics and embrace your appalling personality. Sometimes it pays to be crazy—just look at Picasso. That’s the advice from Dr Margaret Boden OBE, author of The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms and lecturer at Sussex University on the process of creativity. Lauren Bartlett seeks the science behind Boden’s ideas
Creating an online 'meet market' has demolished the barriers between media companies seeking talent, and models and actors seeking jobs.
Virtual manufacturing anyone?
If you can draw your idea, Wellington startup Ponoko can probably make it—and find buyers for it too. Peter Griffin meets the New Zealanders at the forefront of the handmade revolution
Getting smarter, one generation at a time
Of all the differences between people, one factor has a greater bearing on income than any other: intelligence. And IQ scores show that each generation is getting smarter. Jamie Cullinane examines the rise of the smartocracy
Why success, and those who achieve it, sometimes comes from the strangest places
Think you're talented? Creative? Dare we say it: outstanding? Good for you - but if Malcolm Gladwell is right, that'll only get you so far. In his latest book, Outliers, Gladwell turns his focus on the very nature of success itself, making some intriguing connections between The Beatles and Bill Gates, Canadian pro hockey players and Asian rice farmers. He's looked at the traits of successful people and found what they have in common: hard work and happy circumstance. So how do the merely talented get ahead?
