Industry Development and ISV’s

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Another big focus for me is assisting to develop New Zealand’s technology industry. Microsoft actually does a lot to help here a good recent local example is our work to support the Health IT Cluster:

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=5&ObjectID=10339778

I’m responsible for our broad strategy, which really is very simple:

  1. We want to build skills within NZ
  2. We want to convert these into organisations who create wealth for their owners and the community as a whole.

Now that sounds simple so to explain it a little more. I look at it as a five stage process, the real trick is being able to convert organisations and individuals between each of the five stages:

  1. Skills Creation – get the basic technology skills you need to create your idea.
  2. Idea Creation – provide a culture of innovation and assist organisations in creation of marketable ideas.
  3. Idea Incubation – build up a company around the idea and verify the market exists.
  4. Business Building – get the company started, win the first few customers and prepare to scale up.
  5. Business Growth – the basics are all there lets grow the sales channel and opportunity pipeline.

We do and/or support numerous activities in each of these areas and I’ll share with you some of these in future posts. But, trust me we are very committed to this we put our money (and time) where our mouth is!

As always we don’t do this alone – we work with industry organisations and other parties who are keen to put something back into the local community as well.

I’ve got to say that we are lucky in NZ, our culture suits innovation and there are a large number of good support organisations and passionate people around – I’ve been impressed.