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New Zealand Diary: The Future Is for the Young Entrepreneur

Twenty-two hours after leaving my driveway, I landed in Spring.

New Zealand, in late September – and perhaps anytime -- is a beautiful country, but especially beautiful in the “Garden City,” Christchurch where I am attending and speaking at Electronics South Connectivity 05.

The conference is a showcase of electronics and software companies that call Canterbury home. A quick walk through the exhibition area reveals a tremendous degree of engineering talent, if not also entrepreneurial prowess. I visited with a number of companies that have developed world-class applications – but they are hard pressed to explain them.

A case in point: Visual Footprints. The company had developed intelligent video surveillance system that combines sensor technology to detect security events with license plate detection. Designed to detect and prevent “drive offs” at the gasoline pumps, the software most certainly has applications in traffic management, homeland security, border control, among others. The market for this application ranges far from the shores of New Zealand, and with luck the engineers who have developed this technology will get the good help they need to find these opportunities.

This engineering, rather than entrepreneuring, mentality isn’t unique to New Zealand by any measure, but it creates a particularly difficult situation in a country where startup technology ventures have little choice but to address global markets.

The good news seems to be that both private and public initiatives are in place and most surely will pay off in the long run.

One such initiative is “Bright Sparks,” a program that teaches school children best practices in engineering and entrepreneurship. Bright Sparks celebrated their annual awards on Friday, September 30, with a showcase of some phenomenal young talent.

Among these was an energetic and intelligent young woman, Allison Blanchard, who had invented an interactive learning toy to encourage hand-eye coordination in developmentally disabled children. The project brief, Allison told me, was to create a developmental toy, and it was she who determined, after initial market research, that the unaddressed market was physically disadvantaged children. The 16-year old visited a local hospital to observe her target market. She developed and tested prototypes with a young boy with Cerebral Palsy. This direct customer interaction drove changes to both the physical design and the feedback functions in the electronics.

The result is an elegant toy that most certainly has commercial implications.

When I asked Allison whether she intended to market the product, she smiled and shrugged. This was a school project, she said. She really loves accounting and hopes to pursue that career. Let’s hope that at the very least, she applies her bookkeeping skills to an early stage venture; she’s as sophisticated a market-driven project developer as I’ve seen in some people twice her age.

Posted by Chris Shipley at September 30, 2005 06:47 PM

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