Last month in BCC news we discussed what was coming up in the Innovation DHB Competition. To briefly recap, the competition seeks to identify the Palmerston North Hospital staff with the most promising innovative ideas and put them through a series of development workshops, finishing with a presentation to judges followed by an awards ceremony.

Since then the competition has really gotten underway with participants who have brought a wide range of ideas to the programme. These include new app and software ideas as well as new device ideas. The nine finalists of the competition have worked through the three validation evenings run by BCC, with the aim of building a business case to pitch to the judges. This was done with a focus on clearly identifying the problem being addressed while measuring the scope and cost of the problem, then defining the exact solution, its costs and its scalability. The competitors were also coached on using visual aids and storytelling to deliver a compelling pitch.

Next up for the DBH competition is the Dragon’s Den style pitch night on the 17th where three judges will decide who has the most compelling business case. The judges for 2015 are Ken Clark, who is Chief Medical Officer at MidCentral Health, Michele Coghlan who is Director of Nursing at MidCentral Health , Rick Gain who has a background in pharmaceuticals and is a member of Manawatu Angel Investment Group (MIG) and Angela de Zwart who is the Clinical Advisor at Orion Health.

On the 25th of this month a week after pitches, the Innovation DHB Competition will wrap up with a final awards night where the winner of the trip to the 2016 Health 2.0 Europe conference held in Barcelona will be announced. Dr Hong, Sheng Chiong, who won a Highly Commended at the 2015 New Zealand Innovators Awards, will deliver a keynote address on the night.

Looking Back at 2014’s Winner

Last year’s Innovation DHB winner was Mike Perry, a respiratory physiotherapist at Palmerston North Hospital. For patients with restrictions in lung function, one of the courses of treatment is to use a Positive Expiratory Pressure (PEP) device. However, these devices can be prohibitively expensive as not all patients get the same level of positive results. Mike’s device introduces a novel design and manufacturing process that minimises cost through reduced part count while still maintaining functionality.

Recently Perry completed a development prototype with a Fielding design and development company and will soon begin to test its functionality. .

For more information and to follow the competition, click here

 

BCC is located in the Fitzherbert Science Park, amongst CRI’s and research institutions in an old building with a ton of history called The Factory. Constructed in 1929, it was the old Dairy technology building where some of New Zealand’s early dairy innovations took place. Some of the groundbreaking innovations included the isolation of bacteriophages and vacuum pasteurisation of cheese. In 1992 the building underwent a major renovation, which incidentally won a New Zealand Institute of Architecture award. In 2005 the building, by then registered as a Category 1 historic place, became the Bio Commerce Centre before later being reclaimed as The Factory in 2014.

After another round of renovations in 2015, BCC opened The Factory doors to new entrepreneurs wanting to come in and rent desks in the co-working spaces or offices, use our public lounge, meeting rooms and the kitchen. Our aim was to create a dynamic and interactive atmosphere, to fill the space with individuals from a wide range of businesses, where residents could benefit from rubbing shoulders with people in different fields and an innovative environment would be created.

This has certainly been a success so far with all kinds of businesses, sole traders and professionals now spending their days at The Factory. In fact, with several new recent additions to the building, there is currently only one free desk remaining! Some of the new additions to the building include Lattitude Global Volunteering, an international volunteering and gap year placements for 17-25 year olds, Altus, who specialise in the construction of drones, and BlueCell, which we will discuss below in more detail.

BlueCell, a recently setup business, provides informatics services for the life-science and healthcare sector – but the actual description of everything that BlueCell does is actually quite hard to pin down, according to Cass Johnston, the New Zealand side of the operation. After Cass got her Masters of Science in Bioinformatics, she got into developing and implementing bioinformatic systems for hospitals that were not used to dealing with new technology like linux. “A lot of what I was doing was relatively new, so I had to work things out for myself,” says Cass.

With BlueCell she focuses mainly on the IT side, while her four partners who she left in the UK do a range of things including genomics, bioanalysis, statistics, and text mining to name a few.  Cass and her husband left the UK just a few weeks ago to come to Palmerston North and she immediately started working at The Factory. “I went online and it was the only place I found that was really suitable. I didn’t want to be sitting at home working in a new place where I didn’t know anybody, and The Factory has been great – the shared office space is the perfect mix of being social, but not to the point of being distracting. And of course Mel [Manager of The Factory] makes a great coffee!”

For more information visit The Factory Website

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The Young Enterprise Scheme (YES) is a year long competition for secondary school students, that takes them through the process of taking a seed idea and trying to develop it into a functioning business. Young Enterprise Trust has been running Young Enterprise competitions around New Zealand for 34 years and BCC is the Regional Coordinator for Manawatu, Whanganui and Horowhenua Regions.

This year 28 teams, each made of around five members, took part in the competition and were helped along the way on their path to finals by BCC’s Regional Coordinator, Richard Dryden. The year kicked off with E-day, where all schools, teachers and mentors met. Events throughout the year included, Dragon’s Den where students pitched their business to a panel of local judges followed by a trade fair held at the Plaza here in Palmerston North where the students showcased and sold their products. BCC also ran various marketing and business workshops throughout the process to support the students. The YES year ended with an awards ceremony to announce the competition winners on the 29th of October.

“I love what the competition actually enables the youth to do. It lets them see what it takes to bring a product from a seed idea all the way through to the market, and deal with all the humps in the road along the way. The competition helps them learn about themselves and working in groups, and how to come out of failures having learned something valuable from them,” says Dryden.

Seventy buzzing students showed up to the Thursday evening ceremony, excited to see if they would be taking home any awards and who would represent the region at the finals. After milling around in their costumes (the night was Halloween themed) and eating burgers and popcorn for half an hour the ceremony got underway, starting with a short TED Talk and addresses from some key speakers. In concert with Dryden’s comment, the central message coming out of it seemed to be the importance of learning from failure, and their ability to bounce back and learn from this.

Third Place went to Body Coffee, from Palmerston North Girls High. Their product took recycled coffee grounds and other natural ingredients and turned them into a selection of body and lip scrubs. “”It’s designed to nourish the skin, it’s like an exfoliating body scrub, so we’ve got cocoa, sugar, recycled coffee beans and coconut oil. We want to make a range of flavours and things,” say the three girls.

Second Place & BCC Choice Award: BeanStalk Coffee, from Palmerston North Boys High, started their business as a social enterprise by importing their coffee beans from Ethiopia through Trade Aid and giving all of their profits back to the education system in Ethiopia. “They overcame a multitude of hurdles, really identified how to go about the business, worked hard and in the end had quite a slick and well organised business,” says Dryden.

Regional Winners: Generation Zedd from Rangitikei College will go on represent Manawatu at the national finals with their marketing consultancy business. The team focused on market research for firms trying to target teenagers their own age, using techniques like running focus groups. Generation Zedd has secured five different clients, to help them test their advertising campaigns for teenagers.

To follow next years YES competition click here.

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The search for the next agritech superstars continues! It’s been non-stop for ​the ​Sprout ​team ​with 65 applicants registering for the programme from across the country This blew the initial target of 30 right out of the water. The Sprout ​team whittled​ the applicants down to 22 who attended a 20-minute interview with the Selection Committee on the 27-28 of October in Palmerston North. These 22 were chosen by addressing key questions directly via phone and email using an assessment framework inspired by current approaches used by many early stage investors both in New Zealand and overseas.

“One of the main things we are focusing on in our selection  process is the people themselves. We want to find the ones who we think have strong leadership qualities and have capable teams behind them, who we believe can really get their businesses off the ground,” says James Bell-Booth, Sprout Programme Manager. With that in mind, the Selection Committee were drawn together from different areas of the country to bring a range of views and expertise to the process. The 2015 Sprout Selection Committee includes the following members:

-       Alex Wong; Investment Manager, NZTE

-       Anastacia Harlen; Education Project Manager, NZ Young Farmers

-       Bill Murphy; Executive Director, Enterprise Angels

-       Dion Cawood; Innovation & Transformation Advisor, LIC

-       Emma Blott; General Manager, Science and technology, Fonterra

-       Mark Harris; Marketing Manager, Gallagher

-       Mike Hanna; Investment Manager, NZTE

-       Stephen McPhail; Investment Manager, BCC

The tough job of finding the top eight rested on the shoulders of this committee along with support from the Sprout team. It took just over a week to finalise the top eight, so look out for this announcement on Sprout’s website next week. The first block course will be held at the end of November with each participant being flown to Palmerston North. The two day course will take place at BCC and will focus on market validation and international markets. The eight will work through a series of workshops as well as hearing from several guest speakers. They will then continue to work remotely until the next block course in Ashburton in December.

“There are a lot of advantages in offering our programme remotely and allowing entrepreneurs to continue operating in their own regions while working with us. That’s one of the things that makes Sprout unique,” says James.

 

 

We are proud to announce that Air New Zealand has agreed to support the programme. Their support is greatly appreciated and we look forward to sharing more details soon.