⏩Fast Forward #30: Aotearoa’s missing technology strategy🔲

Research, Science, Innovation. But where's the tech?

Kia ora,

Welcome to this week’s ⏩Fast Forward Aotearoa instalment, a weekly newsletter from Memia thinking about the future of Aotearoa New Zealand. Thanks for being here!

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The ⏩Fast Forward Aotearoa website is up! Keep an eye on developments at https://ffwd.nz - you can also follow @ffwdaotearoa on Twitter and on LinkedIn for updates.

The last few weeks I’ve been wading through a lot of reading on public innovation policy and trying to think how it relates to Aotearoa’s [missing in action] national technology strategy … dry work but someone has to do it! Comments and feedback welcomed from specialists in the field…

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Rollcall

Before we get into it, one shout out this week:

• Congratulations to Pia Andrews, formerly head of the oft-missed Aotearoa government Service Innovation Lab. This week Pia was among a number of luminous thinkers brought together by Apolitical to form an Advisory Council on 21st Century Government:

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⏩Fast Forward Aotearoa recap…

The book structure continues to evolve… here’s the latest outline:

Chapter 1: Introduction - Seizing the meta-opportunity from the meta-crisis.

Chapter 2: Defining a small country: just because it’s small doesn’t mean it’s any less complex

In Chapter 3 we explored the current Global “polycrisis”: big challenges, big opportunities:

• Anthropogenic climate change

• Biodiversity collapse

• Global population and demographic shifts

• Geopolitical power shifts

Chapter 4 (yet to be written) will look at key national and local challenges, including some of…:

• Inequality

• Housing affordability

• Education outcomes

• Mental health

• Environmental sustainability

• Aging population

• Rural poverty

• Employment opportunities

• Infrastructure

• Immigration

• Productivity

• National security and sovereignty

Chapter 5 explores the accelerating rate of technology change: But…what has the Singularity got to do with Aotearoa? and surveys general purpose technologies in 2023.

Chapter 6 Time for solutioneering describes a simple but scalable ideation process to crowdsource the discovery of new technological solutions to current international and national challenges, and create a longlist of ideas to consider focusing investment on.

Now in Chapter 7: A national technology portfolio for Aotearoa I’ll try to start pulling everything together: firstly. surveying the current proposed changes to the Research, Science and Innovation system in Aotearoa, and then next week putting forward a framework for a focused national-scale technology portfolio which dovetails with the “mission led” RSI changes proposed in Te Ara Paerangi Future Pathways. Easy.

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🔲Aotearoa’s missing technology strategy

In researching this book, one of my findings is that strategic thinking about technology across Aotearoa’s government and wider public sector is *at best* sparsely distributed and disconnected and, at worst, largely absent. (The aborted attempt back in 2018 to appoint an ill-conceived “Chief Technology Officer” role arguably made this a "third rail” issue which few politicians or bureaucrats want to go near. Plus a “Technology strategy for Aotearoa” is hardly a surefire vote-winning policy platform…)