Tech industry vs the All Blacks

The All Blacks aren’t the only ones limbering up to compete on a world stage against the best in the world over the coming months.

The New Zealand ICT and hi-tech industry competes against the world’s best every day. And NZICT, the group that represents the sector, along with key partners, is holding a number of events in September and October called the Rutherford Innovation Showcase in order to celebrate this.

Before I expand on this, let me firstly explain why I draw commonalities and make comparisons between the technology sector and the All Blacks.

Our NZ businesses don't quite stack up in popularity rankings compared to the All Blacks. We don’t celebrate the win of a New Zealand software company like we do an All Blacks side beating the Aussies.  And we don’t collectively mourn a lost deal like we do an All Blacks’ loss.

However, we know that export earnings are the life-blood of our nation and there are a number of NZ technology companies that deserve All-Black status and admiration as exporters.

According to the Technology Network Investment Report 2010 (TIN100), exports of the top 100 technology companies in New Zealand are $4.9 billion annually, which is now ranked second only to the dairy sector.

I’ll repeat that in case you didn’t catch it. The New Zealand technology industry, in terms of export dollars, is nearing that of New Zealand’s dairy industry.

This is hugely encouraging and critical to our national future.  We must continue to do everything we can to enhance the performance of our great export earners of agriculture and tourism, however no other industry has the opportunity to scale and accelerate its export growth in the way the hi-tech and ICT sector can. 

So we have a huge contribution to make and should absolutely continue to aspire to become our number one export earner, accelerating past our more traditional exports even as they continue to grow.

And we should be cheering those export sectors and their companies on as we avidly monitor their progress.  Our future quality of life absolutely depends on their continued success!

The Government understands this and is providing tremendous support for the industry, but there is still a long way to go before we even begin to realise our full potential.

In the meantime, let's use the Rugby World Cup to celebrate and showcase some of our success stories.  NZICT is hosting a range of events come September and October of this year.

From software to satellites and robots to trade, we will celebrate and exemplify this industry in terms of what we’re doing, what we’ve done and what we aspire to do through the Rutherford Innovation Showcase.

We’ll have a range of quality international and domestic leaders attending our events and we’ll be launching the preliminary results of the TIN 100 2011 results, which should give us more to celebrate in term of industry growth and export statistics!  Some of the TIN 100 companies will be at this event to "pitch" their business to you like they have to do offshore.

We’ll be talking about the future of digital cities, trade and investment in the industry, digital content, big science, employment in the industry and many more things.

And just so we’re catering for a range of audiences and so that this article is still talking about rugby, we’ll even have a robot vs. human kick off, where we’ll test the best of the robot rugby ball kickers (from the World Robotics competition we are holding) against human counterparts.

Our events are free to attend. So make sure you come along and support the technology industry and wear black if you like; many in the industry already do.