Ten days in the United States soaking up the latest agritech trends can leave some big impressions, and the biggest for me was scale – US agriculture is BIG, and has an equally big appetite for new technology. One agritech entrepreneur I met referenced what seems a commonly held view that in the next five years the average US farm will have at least 50 devices measuring and transmitting everything from soil moisture and pest presence to climate indicators. The pace of change is huge and the opportunity that this connectivity creates for new business models is mind-boggling.

Earlier this month I was fortunate enough to join the BioLumic team as they took on a very scary, non-stop itinerary of pitches and meetings with would-be investors, potential customers and the big boys in agriculture. We started in St. Louis, attending the Ag Innovation Showcase alongside 400 senior managers, technology scouts, start-ups and investors; this conference really exceeded our expectations in creating connections to the right people.

BioLumic, a Palmerston North-based start-up that understands how to apply UV light to plants and gain massive growth in yield, was one of 21 companies presenting the latest in agritech. BioLumic’s technology is very impressive but would have been nothing without an incredibly well-rehearsed pitch (think 50+ runs at practice), plus two days on the trade stand and 1:1 meetings. The reward was an impressive set of new relationships that are already delivering results.

Also making a splash at this event was Manawatu manufacturer and developer, Baker No-Tillage, and Auckland-founded BioDiscovery New Zealand, who are smack in the middle of microbial conditioning, a very hot area of current interest. Another start-up commercialising Manawatu science was in the crowd and one of the presenting US companies was led by an ex-pat Manawatu entrepreneur. Phew! New Zealand looked very, very good. Big ups to NZTE, who opened the opportunity, and their superb US-based staff, who worked professionally and tirelessly to create connections.

After St. Louis we headed back to the West Coast and drove over most of Northern California, meeting customers as well as several strategic players and faculty at the very impressive public research university, UC Davis. Standing in the middle of vegetable operations 30-40 times larger than New Zealand’s biggest is sobering stuff, but I can see a huge opportunity here for companies with real solutions to pain points.

Apart from scale, the other reflection is the very real and growing demand for new technology. Feeding the future population of the world is a serious challenge. For those involved in food, the challenge is very real and new technology is required to maximise outputs. But both the standard of competition and corresponding expectations are exceedingly high; if you are a Kiwi company looking to take your technology to the US agritech market, expect some scepticism, including blowtorch scrutiny of your data, ongoing questioning of your technology and in-depth evaluation of your IP. Alongside these challenges, however, the potential for rewards on such a huge scale is equally enormous.

Dean Tilyard
CEO, BCC

 

BCC CEO Dean Tilyard reflects on the impact that Kiwi entrepreneurs are having on the growing US agritech market, plus the challenges and the potential for sky’s-the-limit rewards.

Read the story here

Count to 10 and breathe in…

My next workshop is in 10 days and my VC LASH toolsets are in China and three weeks away (?!).

Staring at the ceiling, not wanting to get out of bed and going over a number of strategies in my head, working out what to do.

BREATHE out…

Problem solved – most of my students are new; they will learn the basics first, then be awarded the VC LASH toolset in three weeks.

Experienced lash technicians (‘tecs’) will be kept busy with a new Art of Volume lash before their VC LASH toolsets come, as I have already given up my own.

Yes, that’s what I’ll do!

Stock is coming in from Asia and has now take over our garage, laundry and hallway cupboards (we didn’t need that many towels anyway, though my husband does object to only one towel each).

This past month has seen me travel to Auckland to negotiate with KESS Hair and Beauty owner Owen Alison. Although he loves the VC LASH tool, it seems his franchise holders are generally not big fans of ‘fancy tools’ and seem to be concentrating on frugality. So my amateur closing techniques were not quite up to scratch; however, on the plus side, I did get to LASH the beautiful Paula Penfold.

And now I’ll be sending my certified VC LASH tec up to Auckland to LASH a group of performers, which is another contract I have yet to finalise for my VC LASH tecs.

This month I will have another one of my certified VC LASH tecs in a salon.

My goal these past few months has been to continually train students. Right now, I’m not so concerned about selling hundreds of toolsets – I just want 10 ladies who can use the toolset faster than me, and I can see it happening. Practice, persistence, and more practice.

Every day, emails from around the world lift my confidence, though being able to persevere without them is my greater achievement.

I have learned a lot more about my target market by being involved in more Lash community groups around the world, which has made me more excited to be introducing the VC LASH toolset and confirming its validation in the value proposition it offers.

Going global with overseas workshops soon – they’ll be in progress by January!

For Tina Faulkner, the business of helping children learn how to write is more than a commercial venture; it’s personal. The Manawatu teacher and mother was recently named as one of two grand prize winners at this year’s BCC Innovate competition for her start-up EpicWriter, an online programme aimed at 6 to 16-year-olds struggling to master writing.

The idea for EpicWriter was born of one of her own children’s learning difficulties. While Faulkner had no trouble finding what she needed to teach other subjects, writing was a different matter. “There are resources out there, but they’re scattered. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing to bring all of it together in one place’.”

The programme she devised is highly interactive, structured around six key writing processes and with plenty of graphics and fun features to sugar the pill. Commenting on the decision to award EpicWriter the grand prize of $10,000, Innovate judge Simon Barnett said he saw “global potential” for the business and noted the “huge commitment” of time and money already invested in the venture by Faulkner and her husband Dave.

With no previous business experience, entering Innovate was something of a trial by fire, remarks Faulkner. As one of the top ten finalists, for example, she participated in an intensive ten-week market validation course run by BCC that challenged every assumption of her business model. “But I enjoyed that. You want to be challenged, to have your idea ripped up, so to speak. Better to find out early than when you’re taking it to the market.”

She has since tweaked her pricing model, but the fundamental argument for EpicWriter survived scrutiny. “Talk to parents and teachers and you quickly realise how big a problem this is. A lot of children are failing at writing.” With the website development almost finished (helped by that $10,000 prize money), the next step will be to trial EpicWriter in Manawatu schools, before going live in the new year.

Fellow Innovate 2014 winner Paul Linklater is building a business future by solving an age-old farming problem. Known as Strip Links, Linklater’s innovative strip tillage machine allows farmers to both work the soil and plant seeds in a single pass, creating prized efficiencies for commercial growers of ‘row crops’, such as maize, sweetcorn and squash. Already there’s been plenty of interest from around New Zealand, according to the Manawatu agronomist, who plans to trial the prototype locally before trucking it to Hawke’s Bay for Wattie’s and other large-scale growers to use in the late season. Full patents and manufacturing should follow in the new year.

Like Tina Faulkner, Linklater rates Innovate’s market validation course as perhaps even more valuable than the $10,000 prize money, which has gone towards product development. “It’s great to have an idea, but is there a market for it? I’d never gone down that track. The Innovate process confirmed that provided we can get the build costs down it will stack up.”

He has, however, completely rethought his sales strategy as a result of Innovate, opting for direct sales against selling through agents. “It made me come up with a better game plan instead of just shooting from the hip.”

The fact that two grand prize winners were named at Innovate this year says something about the growth of the four-year-old competition, according to BCC marketing manager Dave Craig.

“The quality of entries this year was just superb. People came in with solid business plans and a lot of drive and passion behind them. Innovate has gone from ‘throw in any old idea and see what happens’, to producing solid product and companies.”

In other words, it’s fulfilling the brief. “Our end game is to ramp up an ecosystem in the Manawatu. We want good ideas coming through and to surround them with people and money so they can grow from here.”

More than 3000 people work in the medical community in the Manawatu region –people who could potentially come up with lots of new ideas across a range of areas in the health sector.

“The medical community is a technically-minded, innovative group of people,” says Dean Tilyard, BCC chief executive. “We identified the health sector as a growth area that we are keen to explore. We’ve worked with a hospital-based physiotherapist on a technology for asthmatics, and we’ve worked with a concept out of Massey for defining the surgical boundaries to skin cancer that has an ENT surgeon closely involved. There are a lot of good ideas in this sector and our goal is to find good ideas.”

When BCC approached the MidCentral District Health Board, it was pleased to find the organisation receptive to working together.

“The DHB had already been exploring ways to encourage more innovation and problem solving,” says Tilyard. “The DHB isn’t interested in start-up businesses; we are – but the DHB is interested in cultural change and encouraging more innovative behaviour.”

BCC invested a fair amount of time learning about the DHB and understanding the health care system and in late September launched the DHB Innovation Competition.

“About 35 nurses, midwives, specialists and management staff attended the launch,” says Jane Donaldson, BCC tech transfer advisor. “It was a cross-section of hospital staff and they had been given brief details around unleashing innovation within MidCentral DHB. By the end of the evening, two had ideas that they had in the backs of their minds and more have come forward in the intervening weeks.”

While Innovate, BCC’s annual ideas competition, is based on the business model canvas and ideas that can grow into a business, the DHB competition takes a slightly different tack.

“It’s still about innovation,” says Donaldson, “but hospital-based ideas may not be about creating a business. They may be about problem solving or improving a process. The competition aims to bring in ideas and provide a process to develop them.”

It is expected that the competition, which Donaldson believes will become an annual event, will result in the entry of a range of ideas. She expects some ideas to be process driven and some to be based on new intellectual property that could have the potential for commercialisation.

“The DHB wants to increase the culture of innovative thinking and we want to assist,” says Donaldson. “It ties in well with BCC’s goal of creating an innovative and entrepreneurial city and region.”

There’s nothing Martin Goodyer enjoys more than a ‘win-win’ story. BCC’s commercialisation manager has been instrumental in arranging several government grants that pair Manawatu firms with bright graduates wanting to undertake R&D work. “I love doing those grants,” he says. “The company gets an expert, the graduate gets their post-graduate degree. Everyone’s a winner.”

Recently Goodyer played midwife to another of these R&D fellowship grants, which are awarded by Callaghan Innovation, the government entity charged with connecting business with research. The grant of $90,000 over three years will fund Massey Mechatronics PhD candidate Matthew Flammer to work on a research project for Kerf, a small Palmerston North-based engineering outfit that manufactures plasma cutting machines. Flammer will work on a solution to allow Kerf to offer customers bevel cutting – essentially, he will be researching, designing and building a robotic prototype capable of handling the complicated movements required to do profile cuts.

“They’re going to gain a real leap on the competition with this development,” predicts Goodyer. “They’ll have something unique, some IP that no one else has got. It might lead to further R&D work and more jobs – at least, that’s what I’m hoping.”

Kerf general manager Glen Gray is also optimistic, although he notes it’s early days. “There’s no guarantee it will turn into anything – it’s a leap of trust for us,” says Gray, who adds that the company has invested substantially itself in the project. “Doing it this way [with a PhD student] provides a structured development path and should produce excellent documentation for ISO accreditation – meaning a worldwide qualifying piece of equipment.”

The fellowship grant is only one of the instruments available through Callaghan Innovation to encourage R&D work by Manawatu firms. “The idea is that people like me in the regions find companies that want to engage in R&D and other innovations to make them go faster and that have export potential,” says Goodyer.

Earlier this year he organised an R&D grant for Palmerston North-based Hardy Rifle Engineering, run by former New Zealand Army armourer Dan Hardy and his wife Michelle. Callaghan Innovation have kicked in $33,000 – 40 per cent of the cost of developing a new generation rifle silencer for export.

The company employs an innovative ‘monocore’ design in its aluminium and titanium suppressors, as opposed to the traditional use of baffles. That makes them lightweight and compact, so they’re perfect for hunting. The new silencer will also be significantly quieter than previous models.

Michelle Hardy says they’re targeting the US, where heavy steel silencers are the norm, and are hardly used for hunting.

“Over there it’s always been more about decibel reduction. We’re trying to teach the hunting market why you need smaller and more compact silencers and that you can still get the quiet. Using a silencer allows you to shoot multiple game. Particularly if you’re shooting with a companion, it means you can both take game. It’s also good when hunting with others or animals to protect their hearing.”

Winning the Callaghan Innovation grant has helped to accelerate the development of the new silencer, she remarks. “We’ve had to take the equivalent of four full-time staff to do this project, so we’re keen to get it through as quickly as possible. It’s on track.”

That’s music to Martin Goodyer’s ears.

EcoGene, a business unit of Landcare Research, provides DNA-based diagnostic services for biosecurity and biodiversity applications. In May 2014, it contracted BCC to run an account management workshop for EcoGene. The aim of the workshop was to improve customer engagement and business performance – we reported on the workshop in the May issue of BCC News.

The workshop resulted in a full report of recommendations, including a 12-month action plan. The EcoGene senior leadership team and board supported and implemented the plan and in September reported making changes in line with the plan, which include team members having clearly defined roles within the business, including using internal business development and communications staff to save on overheads.

In addition, the pricing model has been revised, terms of engagement specified, and the unit’s interaction with clients has improved to the extent that business from existing and new clients is beginning to increase.

In short, says Dr Frank Molinia, EcoGene’s operations manager, performance has already improved markedly, compared with previous financial years. “We have no hesitation in recommending that other businesses take up the services provided by BCC, especially if they are serious about streamlining their operations, increasing efficiencies and growing revenue.”

How’s this for a New Year’s resolution? Start 2015 in a brand new place.

Co-working spaces are becoming more and more popular around the world and that’s what’s being created at The Factory. Redevelopment is set to begin in the next couple of weeks, with the aim of opening at the end of 2014 or the beginning of 2015.

A shared workspace, The Factory will be home to creative individuals who have a wide range of business interests. There is a range of membership options available to suit the needs of tenants.

For casual members, The Factory has hot desks to use when the mood strikes. For those wanting to make The Factory their permanent work home, there are desks in shared areas; if you need more space, there are private, walled offices.

“We’ve also got funky spaces and breakout rooms, lots of spots to meet and talk and places to get down to business. It’ll be about interactive spaces where entrepreneurs will rub shoulders with investors and business people over coffee and a shared focus,” says BCC marketing manager Dave Craig.

“Renting space at the Factory will be more economical than many options in town. The rates include the office or desk and also operational expenses – such as internet and utilities. For most office spaces those charges are add-ons and can really increase the monthly outgoings.”

But he warns to get in now. “Spaces are filling up fast. We’ve had a lot of interest for both permanent desks and private offices.”

While everyone will have his or her own business to run, the new design of The Factory will create a collaborative environment. Residents –those who have either walled offices or desks in the open-plan shared space – will have access to all areas of The Factory, including the public lounge, meeting rooms and the kitchen. Non-residents are welcome to enjoy the lounge area during opening hours and can hire meeting rooms or the lounge for events.

“We’re renovating the building that is currently known as the Bio Commerce Centre to create a dynamic and interactive atmosphere. This is the first structure to be adapted for the FoodHQ super campus. The Factory opens right onto the Town Square on the FoodHQ super campus plan. We realise how important it is to be part of the FoodHQ campus and where we are placed puts us at its heart.”

You might work for yourself but you can still be a part of something bigger. Contact Dave Craig to find out more about these exciting workspace possibilities at .