The Factory is Palmerston North’s newest and best co-working space. Scheduled to open in late March 2015, it needs a manager.
Co-working spaces are becoming more and more popular around the world. They provide the growing community of modern and flexible workers and companies shared workspaces in dynamic and interactive environments. 
At The Factory, our goal is to be ‘the place’ for ambitious young companies to locate and for those working in the innovation and start up community to meet and work.

There will be organisations of all sizes – just because someone works on a small team doesn’t mean they need to work in isolation. A lot of good comes from interacting with co-workers and other creative people.

The Factory is located in the historic Old Dairy Factory at the Fitzherbert Science Park.

NUTS AND BOLTS

The Factory Manager runs the place. You will have will have responsibility for the management, performance and development of The Factory business.

Here’s where your love of hats comes in. You’ll be wearing a lot of them and that ensures an interesting and exciting job where no day is the same.

HOST

The Factory Manager will provide every customer who comes into contact with The Factory an exceptional experience! Our aim is for service to be our key point of difference and we will not compromise on this!

In this role, you’ll greet visitors and tenants alike with a big smile and a cheery hello. When someone comes for a meeting, you’ll make sure they are welcomed and made comfortable.

You’ll make sure that every customer feels special and has what they need. You’ll ensure the workspaces are clean and organized, there are plenty of coffee beans and mugs and that everyone has been invited to the BBQ. You’ll order the food for morning tea and the beer for Friday drinks.

SMOOTH OPERATOR

As Factory Manager, you will manage any staff so they deliver the same great Factory experience. You’ll establish appropriate systems and processes for efficient management of The Factory. Some of these processes will be point of sale, stock control and maintenance. You’ll make sure everything runs smoothly.

LINKER

In this role, you will know all the members and residents introduce them to each other. When new ones come in, you’ll make sure they aren’t an island. When members need a resource to make their business succeed, they’ll come to you and you’ll help them find it.

AMBASSADOR

The Manager will know how great The Factory is and be keen to tell the world. You’ll Tweet about it; you’ll put photos on Facebook; you’ll pick up the phone and tell the world how great it is. You’ll answer email requests and make sure the website is up to date. You’ll grow The Factory and come up with effective marketing plans and identify new revenue opportunities.

ABOUT YOU

• You love talking to, helping and connecting people with each other.
• Your energy level is high. People describe you as a breath of fresh air and you’ve been known to be the life of a party or two. You like organizing and hosting events. You know where to get good food.
• You are technologically literate and not afraid of learning how to use new equipment. You have a golden touch with copy and other business machines.
• You are a great communicator. You’re happy to talk, write or present. People want to chat with you each day.
• You’re a good network and are plugged into the community
• You’re happy to be in charge but are also a strong team player. You’re a self-starter and work well within deadlines.

This is a full time job.

Along with your CV, include in your cover letter – in ten words or less, what your idea of perfect customer service is. Send to

Four Year 13 students from Palmerston North Girls’ High School have shown that taking care of the environment is good for business.

Jesh Designs, the 2014 Manawatu Whanganui Lion Foundation Young Enterprise Company of the Year, was created by Grace Donaldson, Jacqueline Holmes, Hannah Thompson and Sarah Davies and produces environmentally friendly multipurpose cushions made from recycled materials.

In addition to winning the regional competition in November at the national finals in Wellington on 12 December, Jesh Designs won the Excellence in Environmental Sustainability award.

Along with 18 other student companies from around New Zealand, Jesh Designs travelled to Wellington and presented their business to the judging panel in the national final for the Lion Foundation Young Enterprise Scheme on 10 December. Insert blurb here if news about Wellington.

Jesh wasn’t the only local company to gain national recognition. At the regional prizegiving, the National AUT University Scholar of the Year award – given to the student who scored highest on the annual exam – was presented to Palmerston North Girls’ High School student Anna Skeggs. And the team that scored highest nationally on the business plan competition was the Lawnmoa team from Freyberg High School.

“Lawnmoa makes Kiwi garden ornaments,” says Dryden, “and gave Jesh a run for their money. Lawnmoa was a close second at the regional event and it’s great to see them recognised nationally for their hard work.”

Jesh, an eco-friendly home decor business, uses recycled plastic bottles to fill the cushions. In July they launched their ‘spoon mirrors’, the frames of which are made of spoon heads attached to recycled wood. Along the way, Jesh sold their cushions online, and at the Feilding craft market, The Plaza and Te Manawa.

While sales are important, teams are judged on their performance throughout the year, says Dryden. They were scored on the pitching of their idea to the Dragons’ Den, their overall sales and their annual report. They were also given a score from the regional coordinators.

“Right from the start, the Jesh team was focused and had their heads down,” says BCC events and marketing coordinator Richard Dryden. “They were really very polished throughout and, after winning the regionals, spent days at BCC practising the pitch they presented at the Nationals.”

“YES is a great fit for BCC. We have expertise in launching and growing businesses and sharing business knowledge,” says Dryden. “We’ve already confirmed with the Young Enterprise Trust that BCC will coordinate the regional competition in 2015. We’re already in the planning stages for that and have had debriefs with the teachers involved. Our goal is to make the programme better every year.”

There were 28 teams and 140 students who participated in the 2014 regional competition. The 2015 competition will kick off in February.

Keep up to date with YES activities on the new regional YES website www.yesmanawatu.co.nz.

You can buy a Jesh Design cushion through and a Lawnmoa lawn ornament on www.lawnmoa.co.nz.

For more information or to be a YES mentor, contact Richard Dryden on or Dave Craig on .

Roger Lentle admits his chosen field of research is no glamour posting. Studying the processes of digestion by, among other things, observing pig guts kept alive in a tank isn’t likely to furnish too many enthralling work anecdotes for dinner parties. Nor does it immediately strike you as an area of science ripe for commercialisation.

Yet the work being done by Professor Lentle and his team at Massey’s Institute of Food, Nutrition and Human Health not only has real commercial potential, but it could also ultimately help millions of people suffering from a range of health concerns. Think functional foods and smart pills, and of the benefits of being able to quantify how nutrients and drugs are dispersed and absorbed after we’ve swallowed them.

BCC is currently working with Professor Lentle’s team on three projects. The first is a nutrition absorption index that can be used to measure the rate at which the gut pulls nutrients out of the food. The currently popular glycaemic index, commonly called GI, doesn’t give useful feedback for adjusting food design, according to Professor Lentle. “By contrast, the nutrition absorption index would allow a manufacturer to design a food that releases all the nutrients slowly – and we can measure that.”

The second project is using a naturally occurring plant gum to tackle obesity. The gum from the leaves of the mamaku (black fern) engenders a phenomenon called shear thickening, where viscosity increases the more the material is stressed. Observing that Māori traditionally boiled mamaku leaves to stave off hunger, Professor Lentle speculated that perhaps it ‘fooled’ receptors in the wall of the gut, influencing gastric rhythm and causing food to accumulate in the same manner as a stomach stapling. The next step is to find a way of safely delivering the material in capsule form, before trialling in humans.

With BCC’s help, the team is also in contact with a urology instrument manufacturer with a view to producing a new diagnostic tool for irritable bladder syndrome. This condition causes the bladder muscles to contract involuntarily, often resulting in incontinence, and can be very distressing for many people. Whilst exploring how the stomach relaxes once food is on board, with the idea that interfering with that process might prevent obesity, the team began with a simpler organ – the bladder – using a cutting-edge video system to film and observe waves of contractions. “We suddenly had an instrument by which we could quantify the activity of bladder muscles, and determine whether that was normal or abnormal.”

Whilst the commercialisation prospects from all three projects are exciting, Professor Lentle points out that each arose from blue sky research, as opposed to investigations with a commercial application already in mind. “It gives you a level of understanding of a system that nobody else has, and puts you in a supreme position to be able to push it through those extra yards.”

Jaspreet Kaur, BCC technology transfer advisor, was pretty impressed when she met Professor Lentle earlier this year.

“I went to see him and he had so much to talk about; he’s the kind of person who is always thinking and always coming up with ideas,” she says. Since mid-year, they’ve been working closely together and Kaur appreciates his drive to commercialise. “He has plenty of projects and many with commercialisation potential. We’ve decided to start with these three and the bladder project is likely to be the first to commercialise. We’ve asked Tara Creaven (see profile of Tara in this newsletter) to work on commercialising that project.”

Professor Lentle’s interest in his field of study began early in life. “I’ve always had an interest in guts,” he remarks. “As a boy growing up near Nottingham, I used to beg trout off my grandfather so I could open them up and see what they’d been eating and how their guts worked.”

As the son of poor parents, however, he was encouraged to pursue a more secure profession. He studied medicine at University College London but maintained the research interest by also completing a science degree. Later, as a qualified GP, he took a scientific approach to his work, becoming an expert in the pathogenesis of diseases rather than normal function.

In the early 1970s, he immigrated to New Zealand. A proud socialist, he was particularly attracted by the health system of the day, which he considered one of the world’s finest – “Of course, it’s changed since, regrettably”.

The breakup of his first marriage brought him back to his first love of science. “I thought, ‘Bugger it, I’m going to do what I always wanted to do’,” says Professor Lentle, who completed a master’s in ruminant digestion at Massey University, then a PhD in ecophysiology, followed by a postdoctorate and a period at Sydney University, before he returned to Palmerston North.

The digestive research group he leads is now into its tenth year, during which time it has amassed a tremendous amount of knowledge. “People say, ‘Well, that’s all very interesting but what use is it?’ But five years down the line from observing how bits of guts in a tank wriggle, you can say, ‘Actually, I can now construct an insightful computer model of what happens to food in the small intestine and it’s based on real data, not some sine wave dreamed up by some mathematician’.”

And at that point, blue sky research becomes something else – a potential solution to some real world problem. “If we can, for example, work out how readily a simple sugar that isn’t metabolised goes through the wall of the gut, and can quantify that, then we can dope particular formulations of processed foods with that sugar and assess how they retain it,” he remarks. “That gives a manufacturer insight into the effects of processing and allows them to build foodstuffs that are digested slowly, and so are more conducive to good health.”

He considers BCC to be a vital helpmate in that next step. “It’s easy for scientists like me to know what the next experiment should be. But an organisation such as BCC is a critical tool in getting commercial benefits out of your research, getting tangible products to market and, ultimately, benefiting mankind in a grander sense.”

Just a few weeks after being named as one of two grand prize winners at Innovate 2014, Tina Faulkner was in the midst of her market. An exhibitor at the ULearn14 conference for teaching and learning professionals, Faulkner had the opportunity to showcase her Epic Writer concept to more than 1650 educators.

“It was wonderful,” says Faulkner. “Originally I thought parents would be the subscribers. But at ULearn I learned that schools are also prepared to pay for the product, too.”

She’s now re-working the business model to accommodate packages for schools. She’ll provide a limited free version of Epic Writer for teachers and their students; locked features can be accessed by a subscription upgrade.

“We felt really popular at ULearn. We had a lot of people visit our booth,” she says. “I really wanted the product to be ready for the conference, but it wasn’t. As it turns out, that didn’t make too much of a difference – the teachers were really enthusiastic about it.”

In her Innovate pitch, she wrote that she wanted 50 schools in her database. Thanks to ULearn, she has more than 200.

“Going to ULearn was a real highlight for me. I knew the teachers would be brutally honest and tell me if they didn’t like the product.”

She needn’t have worried. Epic Writer, a website designed to help inspire children’s writing, is visual and interactive and includes features designed to creatively inspire writers in the 6–16 age group. It fills a gap – others have noticed what Faulkner found: there are no resources to help kids learn to write.

Identifying a need and filling that with a product are two boxes that successful entrepreneurs need to tick. But there’s a lot to focus on at this early stage of a business. How’s this for Faulkner’s current triad: she’s working with BCC’s James Bell-Booth on her business plan and getting ready to go looking for investment; she’s putting together her board (entrepreneur and Innovate judge Sharon Bryant has already signed on and will be joined by a literacy advisor and a software advisor); and she’s continuing to develop the product.

Putting together a board is an important but time-consuming process. “Picking a board is harder than you’d think,” says Faulkner. “You need people who relate to the product and its users and are able to suggest ways to improve the product as well.”

Faulkner is justifiably hesitant when asked about a launch date for Epic Writer. Every time she gives one, the target moves. “I like what we have developed; it’s great. But software [development] is so difficult. It has taken a lot longer than I expected.”

There have been hiccups – like finding out that the software didn’t behave on all types of devices when it was tested, which meant a refinement in the design. Never mind, she says, they are “nearly there” (but don’t ask for a specific date. Yet.).

Once the website is ready, it’ll be tested at three Palmerston North primary schools: St Peter’s, Russell Street and West End. Faulkner expects the testing to last two to three weeks and based on feedback from it, she’ll make adjustments and go out for another round. Nearly there.

Faulkner says working with BCC has allowed her to progress quicker and faster. She’s a sponge for learning and at the moment is working with Bell-Booth to polish her business plan and get Epic Writer to a point of being investment ready.

“Tina is really motivated,” says Bell-Booth. “She is quick to engage in the processes and advice she has been given. It is a big learning curve to go from being a teacher to an entrepreneur, especially a software entrepreneur. We have connected Tina with a network of people with global experience and that is definitely making a difference to the development of her business..”

The Epic Writer website is under development and while we’d love to give you the address and launch date, we can’t do that just yet. We can, however, suggest you follow Epic Writer on Facebook, where there’s a teaser video () and its blog (www.blog.epic-writer.com).

Stephen McPhail plans to help Manawatu start-up companies raise their sights. Tara Creaven wants local medical researchers to chase the commercialisation opportunities. If there’s a common theme between BCC’s two new recruits, it’s the desire to foster ambition and unlock potential.

As Stephen puts it, “Why not go after the bigger stage?” The Gore-raised investment manager has been brought in to coordinate BCC’s angel investor network and to help start-ups find funding. It’s a natural fit for a man whose CV includes stints as an investment banker, financial and investment analyst and company director, plus hands-on entrepreneurial experience founding two companies.

“I’m very interested in early stage companies and the issues around growing them, particularly their capital needs,” says Stephen. “I’ve also been an angel investor myself, so I’ve done both sides.”

Much of his career has played out across the Tasman, where he studied for an MBA and then stayed on, founding two gold exploration companies that eventually went on to list on the Australian stock exchange. One of those ventures, King Solomon Mines, is looking for copper and gold on the fringes of the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia. With that company now looking to “transition to the next iteration”, Stephen has decided to do likewise and reinvent himself. With his wife, the artist Olinka Heath, he has built a house at Otaki Beach, within easy striking distance of a 20-acre lifestyle block they own in the Otaki Valley.

The role at BCC has been an eye-opener. Among other things, he’s been “pleasantly surprised” at the cooperation between Kiwi angel investment groups and the level of organisation among local start-ups. “The way they present themselves is very good and I think that’s due to the angel guys working with them, as well as the impact of business accelerators and incubators.”

If he can see any weakness, it’s that aforementioned lack of ambition. “Sometimes you find people are focused only on the New Zealand market. They think that if they can get some domestic sales, earn a couple of million dollars, then that’s good enough. The goal is to get them to lift their eyes to a global target. But my impression is that the presence of angel investors – people who have been there and done that – has already started to make a difference.”

Tara Creaven, who arrives at BCC with more than two decades of experience in the field of medical commercialisation, is also aiming to open eyes. “A lot of medical researchers are very ‘in the data’,” she says. “I’m trying to give them perspective, a new view of where they might envisage their product.”

She certainly has the right background. Raised in Ireland in a family of engineers and scientists, she studied chemistry before deciding to move into the management side. “It was a choice made based on job opportunities. At the time there was over 20 per cent unemployment in Ireland. I headed to the US, to Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay area, which was a hive of activity.”

During the next 20-odd years she forged a career in the medical device sector, as well as in pharmaceuticals, drug and biologics development – often working for innovative start-ups funded by much larger global entities.

“In smaller company environments you get exposed to everything,” she says. “I not only had to manage funding, but also manage investor expectations, regulatory expectations and to be able to deliver on our commitments from a technical perspective. I ended up establishing a consultancy firm, providing those services on a contract basis to start-up enterprises.”

She says she’s always preferred working for herself or in small organisations “where you can get into the data and you don’t have to deal with layers of bureaucracy”.

In that sense, the new part-time role at BCC fits like a glove. She and her radiologist husband Patrizio Capasso moved to New Zealand for lifestyle reasons – “the kids were grown up and we decided to go on a last adventure” – but the work side of the move has proved surprisingly rewarding. “I really wasn’t sure what to expect, but I’ve found my skillset and years of experience can be readily applied here,” she says. “I’m impressed too with the calibre of the individuals I’m working with. I love the intellectual aspect of my job and to get to collaborate with really smart people like these professors at Massey is such a privilege.”

For now, Tara is working one day a week at BCC, focused on a single “very innovative” project in the urology space. But she’s hopeful of expanding the role next year. “I love the team here and what they’re doing,” she says.

Things move fast in healthcare. New procedures, new equipment, new personnel – it’s an ever-changing environment and we all expect these changes to happen smoothly, efficiently and perfectly.

Change might come from innovation, but keeping up with it also requires innovation.

In late September, BCC launched the MidCentral District Health Board (DHB) Innovation Competition in an effort to uncover and develop DHB staff with ideas that could revolutionise their workplace. The competition was open for six weeks and by the time it closed on 31 October BCC tech transfer advisor Jane Donaldson had received 18 submissions.

“We think that’s a really good number of ideas to come from such a targeted population in the inaugural year,” she says.

Twelve staff who submitted ideas were invited to participate in a four-week idea validation programme. Donaldson says this is a condensed version of the Innovate programme with the focus on the key considerations required for implementation of ideas.

“We’re not necessarily working towards launching or growing a business, like we are in Innovate,” she says. “Some entries were medical devices but many of the ideas from the DHB staff were based on process improvements within the hospital. For example, we had a number of online solutions designed to take the place of things that are currently done manually such as patient scheduling and hospital asset tracking.”

Three of the invited 12 weren’t able to commit the time required to participate in the programme but the remaining nine worked through three weeks of idea validation steps, such as understanding the costs and benefits, regulatory requirements and impact on users. During the fourth week, the nine pitched their ideas to a panel of judges and on 4 December the winner – Mike Perry – was announced.

A respiratory physiotherapist, Perry has developed a novel Positive Expiratory Pressure (PEP) device.

“PEP devices are used to treat patients with certain lung conditions and impairments, like cystic fibrosis,” says Donaldson. “There are other PEP devices on the market but they are prohibitively expensive due to the fact that not every patient will get the same level of positive results.. Mike’s solution is a cost effective device that a patient could use on a trial basis instead of an unapproved, improvised device that some physiotherapists currently use..”

Perry will receive $10,000 worth of services to support the idea to progress. Donaldson says that BCC and the DHB will work with Mike to agree the next steps of product development but the money will probably go to a freedom to operate search, the development of a prototype and, possibly, to fund a clinical study.

“The judges really liked that Mike had taken his idea to a point where he had already investigated manufacturing. He had a clear design and had costs for injection moulding,” says Donaldson. “So the product was a bit closer to market than some of the others entered in the competition.”

While different from Innovate, the DHB competition is still about innovation.

“We expected to see a whole range of ideas, from hospital-based process improvements to new product ideas. And that’s what we had,” says Donaldson. “The competition connects well with our goal of creating an innovative and entrepreneurial city and region.”

Donaldson says that BCC and the DHB are already planning for the 2015 competition. She expects it to be open for submissions in September and October.