A collaboration for growth.
How do you help companies go global faster and better? How do you foster collaboration across teams or organisations?
In 2020 an all-of-government taskforce was set up and given NZ$16.4 million to accelerate growth and productivity in the NZ agritech sector. Organisations involved were the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment; Ministry of Primary Industries, NZ Trade and Enterprise (NZTE), Callaghan Innovation, the NZ Venture Investment Fund, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The goal was to grow exports, grow wages, grow jobs, grow (more productive) companies, and ensure NZ’s solutions were a better match for global problems (like curbing greenhouse gas emissions). These were complex challenges requiring sophisticated responses. I was asked to join NZTE to lead its efforts for the taskforce, and there was already a significant list of tactical projects on the table. One of them - with an ambitious nine month deadline - was to help NZ agritech businesses with global aspirations do it faster by improving collaboration between government agencies.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. I could see that fixing the whole system from the start (eating the whole elephant) was going to be too hard, take too long and would lose people. I found a willing collaborator in Callaghan’s taskforce rep and we devised a pilot to try and iron out the glitchy parts of the experience for companies.
Callaghan supports R&D and commercialisation with an eye on global relevance. NZTE helps exporters grow bigger, better and faster. Often Callaghan customers become NZTE customers, once they have started exporting. We were aware that there was a lot of confusion between our organisations and our respective roles in helping companies go global. Could focusing on this be a solution?
What we learned and what we did
Help me go global. Unmet needs uncover opportunities. Anecdotally we knew many companies bounced around for funding and help wherever they could get it. Alternatively, they knew what they wanted but weren’t eligible for help from one agency or another, when they really needed it. In particular, we identified a gap between the exit from Callaghan’s pipeline and the entry to NZTE’s. What if we gave a bit more access to earlier stage companies with export growth potential through a shared service model? Could it grow the NZTE pipeline and the quality of the pipeline? Could we bridge this gap within existing resources? This is where we felt the opportunity lay.
More (or new) isn’t always better. Faced with a problem, it’s a proven human tendency to add rather than take away - more buttons, more forms, more systems, more meetings. We were no different, and the first pilot programme we delivered went down this track of building from scratch - tools, experience, modules. Customers loved it but it wasn’t sustainable for us: it was too labour intensive, costly to deliver and not easy to repeat. Reflecting at the end of this first pilot, we learned that we had a problem with form not content. Reviewing our existing solutions, we found that NZTE had a programme framework with most of the content needed. We fine-tuned it to be specific to the needs of agritech and opened up the customer eligibility criteria to capture earlier-stage companies. Realising that the existing delivery format (pre-recorded online videos) wasn’t getting through, we shifted to a mix of in-person and online content.
A common goal does not guarantee common ground. In terms of the Callaghan/NZTE collaboration, because we were both government organisations, under the same task force, with a common objective, we thought this would galvanise us through difficult decision-making. But as the project progressed, tensions emerged. There were communication breakdowns - issues kept getting stuck or repeated. The core problem was that we had different expectations and organisational contexts that we should have clarified upfront. For the second pilot we designed a collaboration agreement. It wasn’t perfect but it outlined who would do what, where budget responsibilities lay, what was in scope and what was not, what the mechanism for decision-making and escalation would be, and key success metrics. We brought in a third party from within the broader programme of work who could be a mediator if needed.
Results
A successful pilot became a sustainable programme. The solution plugged into NZTE’s existing organisation structure which gave it life beyond its defined and funded life-span. Customers also got huge value: a strong net promoter score (60) and qualitative feedback for the pilot provided the green light for the full-scale programme. Ultimately 30 companies completed the programme over three intakes, with a waiting list for a fourth. Determining whether we’d hit the original goal of accelerating company growth would take time, so as a short-term indicator we tracked how many companies went offshore following the programme. 50% of companies did, indicating an increased level of readiness.
We helped companies get clearer on where, when and how to grow globally. Growing internationally is expensive and complex. If the right business foundations aren’t in place, issues can accelerate quickly and companies can lose money fast going into a competitive global environment. 100% of companies completed the programme with an action plan for growth they could implement and test. This included which market(s) they wanted to enter, a clearly articulated value proposition, and a more granular understanding of their target market. Coming into the programme, target markets were often something vague like ‘farmers’ or ‘growers’. For some, it completely changed their landing focus - say Chile instead of North America - or the direction of their business.
Small wins can have a big impact. A big systemic problem with many moving parts can be hard to address. This project showed how progress can be made by focusing on smaller areas of interaction and a shared commitment to making things better, and removing grit in the system - ideally a customer pain point.
Ongoing challenges to solve
With every role or project there are things you’d have done differently and questions still to explore and answer:
How do we translate our high rate of business formation in NZ, to a more diversified economy (high tech-manufacturing, export growth - like Finland has?)
What if we shifted our mindset from ‘exporting’ to ‘global from day one’?
