 Well, thank you for that introduction. But I'm actually a relatively new Aucklander. In fact, I used to work for Mary Quinn in Wellington once upon a time. And so I had an interesting experience a couple of years ago, so I just moved to Auckland. I've been working at University of Auckland for about a month and I was presenting, talking about similar topic, about innovation to the Red Meat Association of New Zealand. I gave my talk, and it was a different audience to tonight. There were a lot of farmers out there. You picture a stereotype of a farmer. They didn't quite all fit that stereotype. But sure enough, at the end of my talk, a sort of a tall, weather-beaten man got up and said, you know what's the problem with the New Zealand economy? Auckland. He told me that Auckland was the break. It was the bottleneck. We couldn't get our roads right. We've got housing problems. And so actually, if we could just get rid of Auckland, actually, the New Zealand economy would do an awful lot better. So this talk tonight is kind of a little bit of my response to that. And so I want to set the scene for the next two speakers and for our discussion afterwards. And think about, well, is it true if we got rid of Auckland, would New Zealand run a whole lot better? Or are there things that Auckland does that are unique and important to the economy? So tonight's really my response to that question. And so I'm going to start, you know, why are some places more innovative than others? We all have a sense that there are parts of the world that do innovation really well and parts of the world that perhaps don't do innovation so well. And so Auckland, one way of measuring innovation is to look at how many patents we put out per person. How many patents are we filing? Now, patents don't tell us everything about innovation. Some sectors we wouldn't use patents, but in other sectors they're really important and that's the same more or less the world round. So patents are a measure that we can use to get a little bit of a handle on innovation. And so between 1978 and 2008, Auckland produced one patent for every 750 people. Okay, so that's not too bad, right? It seems like there's a few of us running around coming up with new ideas. You know, how about Christchurch? Christchurch has produced one per thousand. And actually that turns out to be the New Zealand average, right? If you average right across the country and you look at how innovative New Zealand is, in fact, you know, Christchurch is the average. New Zealand has produced one patent for every thousand. So in fact, when we look at Auckland, on this measure Auckland seems to be more innovative than the rest of the country. And in fact this is a general trend, right? If you look at cities overseas, the larger the city, the more patents per person the city generates. And so if we go to Australia, and a city roughly about this, it's a little bit bigger than Auckland, but about the same size, if we look at Perth, then it actually turns out that Perth's produced one patent for every 750 people. And sure enough, if we look at Sydney and Melbourne, which are cities of about 4 million people, then we're producing, there's one patent for every 500 people. This actually turns out to be very, very general, right? If we look at lots of different parts of the world, the more people there are, the more patents per person, right? So that's not just more patents because there are more people. Those people are producing more patents individually because they're in bigger cities. And so this not only carries across from patents, we can look at other measures of innovation and find that on other measures of innovation, bigger cities do better. And even productivity, and ultimately, productivity is one of the most important, it's one of the things we want out of innovation. We want to generate higher productivity. We want higher wages. We want more value-add from workers. Bigger cities, indeed, produce more productivity and add more value per employee. And so Auckland fits this trend within New Zealand perfectly. As I've said, Auckland produces more patents per person than the other region in New Zealand. And in fact, it's more productive. In Auckland, enjoy a 25% productivity premium over firms in other parts of the country. This doesn't quite apply to all firms, if you're a dairy company, setting up a dairy farm in the middle of Auckland won't be a particularly productive move. But almost all industries that aren't resource-based, actually if you move them to Auckland, they'll be more productive. So size matters. Size matters when it comes to innovation. But it's not everything. The example I like to use is comparing Detroit versus San Francisco. So you think of Detroit, but we think of car manufacturing. And in fact, Detroit for the long period of time had the three largest car manufacturers in the world. It had all the size and scale you could want. Yet today, we know that it's a city that's bankrupt. The car manufacturers are struggling, and it's really finding it hard to reinvent itself. Whereas San Francisco, a city that's much more diverse, it's got the semiconductor industry, it's the hub of the biotech industry in the US, and it's also where software has taken off. So San Francisco, in a sense, is much more diverse. So it's not just about being the largest. If it was about being the largest, Detroit would be very successful today. It's also about what you do and the diversity of things that you do. And it turns out that cities that are more diverse in terms of their technological or industrial specialisations actually turn out to be doing things that are less common or more novel. And so they're doing things that perhaps they have less competition in. So why might that be? Well, this is partly because cities, particularly diverse cities, are a dating service for ideas. It's where ideas come into contact. And I like to use this example. This is actually a shameless plug for my book. But there is a lesson in this. So there's a great innovation on the cover of my book. It's the barcode. And it's really interesting to think about why did we end up with barcodes on all our products? Well, it required the meeting of two quite different ideas. The original barcode came up by the US National Railways Corporation. And they were looking at ways to keep track of their railway wagons. And so they had this idea. We'll paint these coloured strips on the side of these railway wagons. And that'll be a unique identifier for our wagons. And we'll stop losing them in different parts of the country. The problem was, and this was in the early 1960s when they didn't have an efficient way of reading them. And in fact, they had to wait another 20 years before the technology that they needed to read these barcodes actually became available. And that was the laser. Now, the laser actually was invented around the same time as the barcode. But it took 20 years for these technologies to meet and produce something that was usable. So what's going on in cities, in big, diverse cities, is that ideas are meeting and going on to create useful innovations. And so in fact, this is New Zealand regions. And so here's the diversity of industries within New Zealand regions. So the further out you are out here, the more industries that you support in your region. And so sure enough, Auckland's out here. If you're down this side, then you're much more specialised. You have fewer industries. And here's the uniqueness of those industries. So here, industries up here are not very unique. So everybody has those industries. And so Gisborne and the Hawkes Bay are up here. Whereas Auckland's down here. So Auckland's not only the most diverse economy in New Zealand, it's also doing things that no one else is. And again, this turns out to be a general trend. The more diversity, the more unique the things are that you're doing. And part of that is explained by the fact that you're allowing new ideas to come into contact and generate new industries. So Auckland has a greater diversity of industries than any other region in New Zealand. And many of these industries are unique to Auckland. Auckland's the only part of New Zealand participating in them. So actually, Auckland's not a break on the New Zealand economy. It's not the bottleneck. Auckland's our innovation engine. Auckland is our most productive and innovative city by almost any measure you can come up with. It's got a greater diversity of industries than any other New Zealand city. And many of these industries only exist here in Auckland. And I think the conclusion is that New Zealand will not succeed if Auckland doesn't succeed. So I did manage to get a response a little bit like that back to my dairy farmer, who I was talking to, but without all the charts. However, of course, we know that that's not all the story. We know actually there's a big wide world out there. So it's great that Auckland's the most innovative city in New Zealand, but actually there's a whole world out there. And we know there are much bigger cities and there are much more diverse cities out there. So what are we going to do about that? Instead of competing and thinking about what's going on in the rest of New Zealand, how does Auckland start thinking as if it was a city much larger to take on these bigger parts and more innovative parts of the world? Well, part of the clue lies in if we zoom in. So this is some work we did, and actually this is what I was doing that Saturday night on my laptop at home. I decided to construct a social network of inventors in New Zealand. So I downloaded a big patent database, looked at, and you can pull out because inventors write down their home address on the patent database, you can geolocate them, and then you can build their social network based on who they've worked with. So if you've filed a patent with someone else, then I take a guess that you know them and I can then reconstruct the network of people as they've interacted, as they've innovated. So this is the map of Auckland. What we learn is that, again, the bigger the city, the more networked the people are in that city. So Auckland has the densest network of innovators in New Zealand, but actually if we went to Sydney, Sydney has a denser network of innovators than Auckland. And if I go to Tokyo, Tokyo has a denser network of innovators than Sydney. So my first conclusion as to where Auckland needs to go is we need to get much better at connecting. We need to build connections. We need to make sure that our city is well connected and that we're actually innovating with others. It's no use to have this great social network if we're not sharing ideas, right? It's all very well-going for a beer with everybody in Auckland, but if you're tight-lipped about what you're doing and you're not prepared to share your ideas and exchange them and allow them to collide, then actually that social network is useless. And then my last point is really we need to diversify, right? I mean, so many times I hear that in New Zealand, well, you can't do that, right? New Zealand, we're good at farming, right? And so somehow what we do has to be connected to the land. Actually, we can compete globally on anything. And so we've got to stop telling ourselves, got to stop constraining ourselves about the types of things we can do. And the data shows that as we become more innovative, we will indeed diversify and become a more diverse economy. So I'm going to leave it at that.