 Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. I hope you are all well. Thank you so much for having me here today. And for those of you who are here from overseas and around the world, welcome to our terror. We are one of the youngest nations on the earth and it is that youth that provides us with many, many opportunities as a country. But also the odd challenge for us as an innovation ecosystem. And that's what I'm going to talk about today is having been around the ecosystem for a couple of decades now in corporate innovation roles and start-ups through to also people like creative HQ, incubators, accelerators. I've got quite a good view on what it looks like. I've got a few notes here so that I don't go too far off track because I've only got 15 minutes. I thought I'd start actually sharing a little bit about Callahan Innovation just really, really quickly to give you context of the lens that I'm talking through mostly from today. We are New Zealand's innovation agency. We are here to catalyse demand for innovation and to accelerate the commercialisation of the incredible ideas that we have throughout our country. We do that by showing our businesses the future of where technology and innovation is going by encouraging them and stimulating them to be innovative and do R&D themselves. And we also do that by liberating innovators, by helping connect them to others that can help them solve their challenges. I thought I just also wanted to share a little bit about how the government sees innovation, research, science and innovation as the portfolio that we sit under. And the government is very committed to all three of those. The great thing is that the new government also understands that research and science is really important to a country, but innovation is absolutely critical. You can have all the amazing ideas in the world, but if you can't take those two scale for the world to make impact and benefit, then the ideas just sit there on the shelf often doing nothing. So our Minister's view and her words, I thought I'd just share this with you, is that innovation when set against a powerful vision is incredibly powerful. And the government's vision for New Zealand is that we are an economy, a society that does create well-paid jobs, that is an inclusive economy and society and is one that looks after our environment. So how she is thinking about how innovation can support the government's agenda is things like eradicating child poverty and also transitioning to a net zero carbon economy by 2050. So personally we're quite excited and we're already working with a range of businesses who can help the government's agenda in that space. So let's get stuck into my observations of innovation in our country and what it looks like. First of all, right across our lands, we have amazing ideas. I went round and visited 200 of our customers last year. We went with about 2,500 customers. We have incredible ideas being developed in our country. They are world-class, they are phenomenal and some of them are seeing the light of day and others are not. The world is definitely starting to understand that and if you look at a SNP, or a snapshot of what's been invested in or who are partnering with our companies over the last year, you've got Rocket Lab, you've got Snowbury, you've got Robotics Plus, you've got StretchSense. We've got some incredible ideas that are getting the funding that they need to be able to have impact on the world stage. So the quality of ideas is excellent. We also have some outstanding individual entrepreneurs and I won't name them because we have plenty and they will be featuring here, I'm sure. And the other really unique thing I think about our country is how well our indigenous economy is now going. Our Māori economy, which is around $50 billion, it's valued at recently, is growing from strength to strength. And what I am observing is in our non-Māori businesses, they are intrigued by the principles of Māori, the kikanga, the practices that they bring to their businesses to make sure they are sustainable, inclusive, that they are looking after communities. And I think over the next decade that will become an increasing competitive advantage for our businesses on the world stage. But the challenge is how we scale those ideas. That's really where I think the biggest challenge in our ecosystem sits. So let's have a look at that. The first one is our businesses must think globally from day one. And that's the benefit of sessions like this and connecting to international entrepreneurs and innovators is we kind of want to think global but we don't always have the confidence. We are a young nation. We don't have decades and decades and generations and generations of successful entrepreneurs behind us. You can help provide us with that confidence. The second one is a lack of investment in R&D and that is a goal of a current government and a huge focus of Callaghan Innovation is that our businesses are applying technology to improve products and services, improve manufacturing processes, new business models and on it goes. We are making very good progress there. We have more work to be done. The third is a major challenge and that is funding. We know that our angel community is growing nicely and we've been tracking that for a while now and that is in a good space. Where we have our biggest gap is 2 to 10 mil and that is critical to be able to taking these ideas and scaling them to global impacts on the world stage. So that 2 to 10 mil is a real challenge for us and as a result of that we are actually underselling our IP on the world stage. If you think about what we gave wireless technology away to Apple for it's not a disclosed number. Many of us can probably guess the ability to wirelessly charge every wireless, every mobile Apple device around the world, that was an absolute steal. And so the ability for us not to get that funding to support our businesses to the necessary level of global scale that we need means that we are in instances selling out our IP in terms of what it's really worth on the world stage. So that 2 to 10 million space and up is a real problem and the last one that I see is the lack of connection between the two countries. We're not really at test bed yet. We could be for Maori nationals to bring their ideas and pilot more of their new products and services, new approaches here and the benefits of that is one, our international local market knowledge goes through the roof and two, the disciplines and practices we will benefit from those in regards to how we do business in New Zealand. And the final challenge that I see is that directors available and having enough of them to be able to help globally scale fast these high impact ideas. We're seeing more directors coming through but we simply don't have enough that understand how to take a zero or a push pay or a rocket lab from start and in 10 years that they are billion dollar companies. Having said that, we are spitting out of our ecosystem about one billion dollar company every year. So when you think of all the constraints that we're getting under, that's pretty damn good. Which shows the calibre of the ideas that we have. Is that, hurry up? No. Is that good? Okay, awesome. So the last bit that I wanted to talk about was some of the advantages that we have. We know and we understand our challenges. The government is focused in supporting the sector in that and that is that our investment in science is really strong. We're spending well over a billion dollars a year in science in our country. What we must do a better job is connecting what we are finding in that, you know, is about one and a half billion, I think, in that research and connecting it into business, into start-ups so that we can take those ideas from the shelves of universities and CRIs and put them into the market in New Zealand around the world. So we're actually investing a lot there. The government's getting behind and has been getting behind tech incubators, that's likely, we hope that will continue. That is one of the hardest part of the markets but one of the most rewarding parts when you get it right. NZTE, Vifin and Callahan Innovation are coming together around how we can actually provide a much stronger platform of services to innovators and entrepreneurs in New Zealand. So we now understand when does a customer come into Callahan, do they take to then get funding by Vif and at what stage they then need to go into NZTE. So connecting into this program is another big part of government services coming together with the MB Global Impact Visa Program. I thought I'd just touch a little bit about sectors. We have a really very strongly growing high-tech sector in New Zealand, the 200 or so top companies there are now creating around $10 billion of revenue which over 70% of that is global revenue. That is a very strong and fast-growing high-tech sector. Agriculture is another area that is critical to our economy and while we don't quite yet understand the world threat around alternative proteins in New Zealand, we are starting to see some new ideas emerge such as Sunfed which have the potential to become another billion-dollar company in the next five to ten years. So we've got progress there but we need to do more there and we've already talked about the Māori economy which is going from strength to strength as well. How can we help just quickly? We provide a range of ways, we provide grants in regards to helping you do R&D. That will transition some of that into tax credits, more on that for those of you who are interested in the coming month. We provide programs to help build capability, innovation capability in organisations. We do international delegations which is one of the most successful ways to stimulate that global ambition and we also have a couple of hundred scientists ourselves who are helping businesses do that R&D in areas like advanced manufacturing, robotics, big data, et cetera, et cetera. So we can help in a number of ways. So moving forwards and kind of finishing up now was really to leave a collective challenge to you. Callahan Innovation can play a really strong role in connecting the ecosystem. However, we need to be working very closely on the parts of the ecosystem to do that and that's where our focus has been shifting over the past six months. One of the ways that we're doing that moving forwards is standing up an online connection platform with kind of tagged scale-up nation at the moment but that's probably won't be its final name. But that will be where startups, investors, incubators, accelerators, universities can all come together to see and get visibility of the companies and startups in New Zealand who are doing incredible work. And at the moment it's really hard to connect and find because all that information is in our heads and it's not any good individually in our heads. So how do we extract that, get that down so international investors can come in and see all of the talent we've got and we can also be better connecting the resources that you need across the ecosystem. The next one is in regards to how we put more capital with our entrepreneurs and innovators. So we've been working with NZVIF who are doing work in this space and part of why we are very keen to connect into here and into international capital that is coming into our country is to support the strong connections that we need there. We are also very interested in how we can create some public-private partnerships with the government around some of the government's focus. So we're talking to them at the moment around we work with about 100, 150 organisations in the clean energy green space. So they are companies that right now could be adding value to our transition to a zero-carbon economy. So connecting them with the work that the government's doing is a good example. Connecting Auckland University's got a robot tree planter that the technology they've built for that. So connecting that into the government's billion tree problems et cetera et cetera. So we can absolutely play a role there where the government can achieve its vision by tapping into the ideas that we have here. And the final one is making sure and I think this is an area where New Zealand can pioneer roles. Many economies have struggled for the benefits of innovation to be inclusive for all of society and as we head into the fourth industrial internet revolution we know that we will not be in a position where products and services or production is short. So we have enough capacity as we head into the next decade to produce for everybody. So how do we make sure that everybody can have access to the benefits of that production? We've come out of a production shortage. We will have enough for everyone. So thinking about ideas in that space is really interesting as well. So I'm going to wrap it up there with a minute and a half to go and just say to you all it's fabulous to connect and kia kaha, kia maia, kia mano anui, be strong, be steadfast and be willing. Kia ora.