Connected for Innovation: Watch our short documentary exploring SfTI's contribution to innovation in Aotearoa
13 June 2024 | Read time: 4 minutes
Watch our short Documentary about: How resourcing relationships has primed Aotearoa for a flourishing high-tech future.
In the final months of the Science for Technological Innovation (SfTI) National Science Challenge, the SfTI team has been working hard to capture stories and data that allows us to share the lessons learned from this decade-long mission-led experiment.
We’re so proud of the teams and technologies that have pushed the limits of high-tech science with SfTI support over the years, but primarily we’ve been struck by the power of the diverse and broad networks that our mission-led approach to science has created.
SfTI has sort to build a collaborative and mission orientated community to maximise real world impact from the research, which has challenged a traditionally competitive and siloed approach to funding for high-tech science.
“SfTI had a unique mission to enhance the capacity of Aotearoa-New Zealand to use physical sciences and engineering for economic growth and prosperity. This has meant investing in the high-tech researchers of Aotearoa to grow their capacity for innovation and, as we discovered over a decade, the most important part of that was to nurture a culture of connection.” Said SfTI Director Sally Davenport.
“SfTI had a unique mission to enhance the capacity of Aotearoa-New Zealand to use physical sciences and engineering for economic growth and prosperity. This has meant investing in the high-tech researchers of Aotearoa to grow their capacity for innovation and, as we discovered over a decade, the most important part of that was to nurture a culture of connection.” Said SfTI Director Sally Davenport.
The connections between industry, Māori and researchers from diverse disciplines underpin the progress that has been made within SfTI towards impact in a multitude of scientific areas, but they also form our legacy. As they will remain in our innovation system after SfTI and the other National Science Challenges are long gone.
In this documentary we hear from researchers turned entrepreneurs, users, communities and industry as well as the SfTI leadership team to understand how there has been a cultural shift in how science is done. What becomes increasingly clear and is expressed so well by SfTI researcher, Jesse Pirini, is that successful innovation is less about the complex science and more about the simplest of things, human connection.
“What I hope gets carried on from SfTI is this realisation that the connections between people is really where the knowledge resides. And we need to support and stimulate those connections and we need to support people to figure out ways to build those connections”
Jesse Pirini, SfTI Spearhead Researcher for Building New Zealand's Innovation Capacity (BNZIC)