Icehouse geared for Maori development push
Plans to expand iwi partnerships to get into significant area of the economy.
Friday, December 02 2011 || News || BY Amanda Sachtleben
It has been expanding its networks by supporting the University of Auckland Business School’s diploma and graduate programmes in Rotorua and Whangarei and annual Maori business awards. This resulted in an approach from Te Au Maaro o Ngāti Pukenga, which wants to form an innovation network involving other iwi, says Icehouse CEO Andy Hamilton.
“In 2003 we launched a programme in agribusiness. We saw that was a really important sector of the economy. In the situation of iwi, we think that is also a really important part of the economy.
“We have some assumptions around the value we could bring in the areas of innovation and entrepreneurship but we also recognise we don’t know too much about working with Maori. In our experience of dealing with different iwi they are very open to learning and are very entrepreneurial. As part of our NZ Inc remit we can see this is an important area - it’s hard to say how big it could get for us but we see over the next 10 or 20 years this will be a very important part of the economy.”
In the new year the Icehouse will run workshops to better understand the iwi’s level of innovation, says Hamilton.
“We’ll then expose some of the iwi members to the principles of entrepreneurship and other successful Maori entrepreneurs,” says Hamilton. “Then we’ll get alongside them and help them actively to turn some of those ideas and businesses into stronger businesses.
“Not only will we help contribute with their people, they will help us in terms of taking us into other iwi. One of the outcomes will be that they are looking to set up a Maori innovation network and we’ll be a partner in that. We’ll have to work next year on how big that will be.”
What happened to all the discussions with Chris Insley for Ngati Porou?
Posted by MP at 11:28 on December 2, 2011
I was a bit liberal with my comments on ICEHOUSE contributing to the Business School's programmes. It is more accurate to say we have watched and learned, from what the B-School lead by Manuka Henara have done - they are really forging great relationships and connections. So we are very appreciative of that, and our key leader of this work with Ngati Pukenga is Dr Christine Woods from the Business School.
Posted by Andy Hamilton at 10:20 on December 2, 2011
Isn't this the same story you guys ran about two weeks ago?
It read like a parody of NZ PCspeak then and it still does.
Posted by Deja voodoo at 02:50 on December 2, 2011
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