From Videotex to Web 2.0: The History of ICT Innovation in NZ

10:50am 16 September 2010

New Zealanders pioneering spirit and “No 8 wire” attitude means they are seen as being both innovators themselves and fast adopters of new technologies from elsewhere. This has been particularly marked in the ICT sector.

This presentation will use data from national statistics and newspaper resources to follow the story of ICT innovation from 1985 shortly after David Lange’s labour government implemented the sweeping economic changes known as “Rogernomics” to 2005 when New Zealand became the first country in the world to launch a Digital Strategy.

Innovation is the ability to create or adopt new ideas. Statistics New Zealand uses the following definition:

“An innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service) or process a new marketing method, or a new organisational method in business practices, workplace organisation or external relations.”

Three factors will be explored in detail: home grown IT entrepreneurs; the adoption of ICTs developed elsewhere by both business and the general public; and the growth of electronic commerce.

There are success stories. When new technologies such as Eftpos and the Internet arrived, Kiwis were quick to adopt them and the country had one of the fastest take up rates in the world. There were real hopes that ICT would be a major factor in solving the economic difficulties caused by the counties geographic isolation. However there were also disappointments along the way, the IT industry did not expand as quickly as hoped, and the ambitious targets of the HiGrowth project had to be scaled down.

The presentation will explore both the success stories and the disappointments and tease out some of the reasons behind them. It will conclude with a discussion of the way forward for ICT innovation in New Zealand.

About Janet Toland

Janet Toland is a Senior Lecturer in Information Systems at Victoria University of Wellington.

She has been active in the field of Information Systems for more than 20 years, as both a practitioner and an academic.

She has worked in the United Kingdom, Botswana, Fiji and New Zealand. Her interests include the history of computing, end user computing, systems methodologies and the digital divide.