By Tony Field
New Zealanders are being encouraged to embrace science, to help grow the economy to its true potential.
The Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister, Sir Peter Gluckman says New Zealand knows what it wants - a prosperous, green and socially cohesive society. But we need to decide how the best way to use science, technology and innovation to help us get there.
Sir Peter's issued a report summarising a wide range of views from among more than 250 people who gathered at a recent forum in Gisborne. The forum was the idea of the late scientist Sir Paul Callaghan, who passed away in March.
Among those who participated were Government agencies, science organisations, academics, business leaders, iwi, successful New Zealand entrepreneurs and young people.
He says there has been a positive shift in New Zealand's thinking about science and technology, compared with a decade ago. Ten years ago a discussion about how science would add value to New Zealand might have been seen as isolated and arrogant.
But Sir Peter says big challenges remain.
- Watch the video for an extended interview with Sir Peter Gluckman.
He says we have been a "lucky country", able to rely on selling food and tourism. But we've waited until the last five years before policy makers changed their mind set towards science and innovation. It means we are 20 - 30 years behind other smaller countries like Singapore, Finland and Israel.
It’s now recognised that you can't get economic growth without certain trade offs, for example "resource extraction". He says it's important therefore that decisions are made based more on knowledge rather than solely on emotion.
Many of those who attended the forum are concerned that "science is still perceived in many quarters, including within much business, as a luxury rather than an essential underpinning component of innovation and development."
Concerns were expressed at the forum that the science system in New Zealand is too fragmented and it is too isolated from the rest of society.
Sir Peter wonders whether New Zealand as a nation is "too risk averse, afraid to make mistakes, and rapid to condemn entrepreneurial failure."
The combined amount spent by the public and private sector on research and development is about a third of that of countries of comparable size.
Although New Zealand has a good environmental reputation internationally, it was suggested at the forum that New Zealand has lost its international reputation as a test bed of innovation. Sir Peter says one cost of that has been that, "we have lost the interest of multinational corporations."
The innovation potential of the Maori community is also "sadly underestimated."
New Zealand is a small nation and Sir Peter says we can use this to our advantage, as they have in countries like Denmark, Singapore, Korea, Israel and Finland.
He says over recent decades most other small advanced nations have invested significantly more in science.
"This higher public investment in research and development in other countries had been paralleled and then exceeded by increased private sector investment. This has seen dividends coming to these countries in terms of their economic development and international standing.
"We tend to be complacent - selling food and tourism has been relatively easy, but worryingly, exports as a percentage of our economy have stagnated over some years. As a nation we have been relatively satisfied with ourselves and not as ambitious as we need to be in order to thrive despite the inevitable challenges, including those of the rearrangements of the global economy over the coming decades".
3 News