
The Productivity Commissions Looking To The Future Report out today, raises no new questions or answers as to how we are going to increase New Zealand productivity.
I and many others were asked to give time to a series of workshops across New Zealand that were at the time, pitched as helping to guide the future of the Productivity Commission. Now that the Commission is on the point of being disbanded, this report has been slightly re-skinned as a kind of wrap up.
During workshops, I had an inkling that independent voices were not being sought. This has been brought home to me in the result.
Try as we might to get to the bottom of why productivity is low in New Zealand, we are missing a key ingredient. The Commission recognises that innovation is important but fail to recognise the origin of much innovation. Just as organisations also fail to recognise the opportunity hiding in plain sight. This is the opportunity that Unlock Innovation, a start-up company, is setting out to address.
Unlock Innovations attention is firmly focused on the technology sector, as without doubt this sector penetrates every aspect of our lives, our businesses, our research and our governance. The Commissions inspiration has come from other countries, tracking in the same time-honoured way through workshops, proposals and reports but are not uncovering the source of innovation either.
New Zealand fancies itself as different, but I’m afraid that originality is hard to find.
We know that 1 in 5 New Zealanders are dyslexic learners. We can continue to choose to see that as a deficit or we can choose to look at the emerging science, that tells a completely different story. The dyslexic brain offers many of the 21st century skills identified by the World Economic Forum. We believe this failure directly opposes 'the role of investment in human capability to drive productivity growth,’ as stated in the report.
If we were to commit to long-term thinking as the report proposes, and look at the intergenerational effects imposed on those who think differently, we would be doing something much bigger than regurgitating the same findings. The report also asks the question, how New Zealand might capture the benefits of intangible capital.
1 in 5 New Zealanders equals 1 million people. 1 million who will battle on through lack of recognition of their potential contributions. If they know they have dyslexia, they will most likely choose to hide and compensate but many do not know and sadly think they have a missing neuron. Either way our organisations, be they private or public, need to reconsider their people and culture practices that deny these thinkers the opportunity to be the innovators they can be.
Unlock Innovations aim is to make that intangible capital tangible.
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