Bayer New Zealand and the National Business Review have presented 60 of the country’s top achievers in innovation on these pages over the past six weeks.

Today the six category winners of the Bayer Innovators Awards, in association with NBR, are named. Judges were looking for people who were setting an example of national and international achievement. Graeme Kennedy and Fiona Robertson report.

SCIENCE & HEALTH
OLAF DIEGEL

Medical monitoring equipment will become as common in homes as built-in entertainment systems to create healthier populations and cut treatment costs, AUT Professor Diegel says.

“Billions of dollars are spent on sick people, curing them rather than preventing illness and Xrystal fits into the preventative stage,” he said.
“It is the first blood-pressure monitor with LCD technology and uses blood-sugar levels and body-weight to track health trends so people can take preventative measures before they become ill. If people can easily see the trends over time they will take action.”

Operated with New Zealand-designed software, Xrystal will become even smarter as it expands into areas such as asthma and forecasting conditions that could lead to cardiovascular disease. Prof Diegel led an AUT, Taiwanese and French team that designed and developed the device.

“It talks to our software to track trends and averages which can be either printed out or emailed to a GP. It will also give advice such as the correlation between blood-sugar levels and weight and health risk.”

The Xrystal was designed as a piece of consumer electronics displaying time and temperature rather than as a medical device.

DESIGN & ENGINEERING
CHRIS MARDON &  TOM MACKENZIE

Energy-efficient light bulbs might lack a certain romance but Chris Mardon and Tom Mackenzie are hoping to change that. Their company Energy Mad is working on a dimmable version of their Ecobulb, with hopes of bringing it to market by the end of the year.

It’s just one of the design twists Energy Mad has brought to the compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) market. They started with a bulb that had a high power factor, meaning large installations could be used without disturbing the electricity network, and went on to develop replacements for mini downlight halogen lights.

Energy Mad has met its target of getting five Ecobulbs into more than half the homes in New Zealand. These will save enough energy over their lifetime to power all of the homes in a city the size of Christchurch for one year.

Technical director Tom Mackenzie puts the company’s success down to knowing the market. For example, the team “had a hunch” that energy-efficient halogens would be sought after, Mr Mackenzie said.

But they engaged market research specialists to discover if there was a market, before they worked on the product. “We were very careful not to try to second guess what people want or think,” he said.

AGRICULTURE & ENVIRONMENT
JOHAN VERBEEK

Raw animal blood is Dr Verbeek’s starting point in his development of environmentally friendly plastics derived from protein. A Waitako University company, Novatein, has been established to commercialise his patented process, which has attracted domestic venture capital and is expected to have the new biodegradable product on the market within five years.

“The New Zealand polymer industry has an annual turnover of $1 billion and 50 per cent of that is plastic packaging which is mainly perceived as an environmental threat,” he said. Dr Verbeek began researching polymer production from starch in potatoes and corn before turning to protein from milk and plants.

“But we are now using blood meal and changing it into plastic materials. We have got the process to work and can extrude and injection-mould products.” New Zealand annually produces 80,000 tonnes of raw animal blood, which yields 16 per cent in solids with just 10per cent of those needed to make the venture viable.

Each kilogram of meal, with additives, wwill produce 1.5kg of polymer. “It will not become a commodity material as volumes, although large, would not be big enough. It will become a niche alternative to existing plastics. We are also looking at a biodegradable alternative to glass.”

IT COMMUNICATIONS
MIKE CARDEN & MARK HELLIER

Staff performance reviews were until recently carried out by an HR boss ticking boxes on a prescribed paper form to evaluate their workers’ worth from a compliance viewpoint.

Many IT systems have since been developed to better perform the task but they still focused on box-ticking, says Sonar6 co-founder Mr Carden. “CEOs have always said people were their most important asset but they didn’t know a lot about them.

Rather than being compliance-driven, an engagement approach is needed so everyone gets value from the process. Staff get value in knowing where they are heading, with opportunities to develop themselves along career paths, while management gains an overview of all people in the business and where their strengths and weaknesses are.

Sonar6 is the world’s only graphics-based employment management system – it can rate people against performance criteria such as customer satisfaction, leadership and motivation. And it can identify upcoming talent to help management build succession plans and address retention issues.”

Mr Carden said the graphics approach enabled performance comparisons of individual departments and teams within a company. Sonar6 is used by more than 50 companies in New Zealand, the US, UK, Australia and India.

MANUFACTURING
DAVID PERCY

Helping other companies put out fires is all in a day’s work for electrical engineer David Percy, who founded fire detection equipment manufacturer Pertronic Industries in 1982.

But there’s no heroic drama behind the secret to the company’s success – Mr Percy puts it down to maintaining a specialised focus and constant reinvestment in new product design, to make sure the product is never outdated.

Pertronic Industries has grown from being a one-man band more than 20 years ago to overtake its multinational competitors in local market share. Over that time, fire detection equipment has evolved from simple gadgets any electrician could knock together into sophisticated software-based tools.

“Innovation is a relentless focus on keeping the product the best,” Mr Percy says. From incremental developments to brand new systems, it’s about “doing a number of things better than the opposition.”

Pertronic employs 20 staff at its head office in Lower Hutt as well as offices in Auckland, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. It entered the Chinese market in 2006 with products designed specifically for that country.