CRIs and business brought together by sustainable paint

Shaun Coffey, chief executive of Industrial Research (IRL), freely admits that marketing the Crown Research Institute’s (CRI) capabilities was one objective of the $1 million competition it ran last year. The other was to encourage companies to think about what their customers need and what they might do to plug that need, he says.

“We wanted to try and stimulate industry interest in investing in the future, investing in technologies needed to help industry to change, to cope with the machinations of the global financial crisis, and set themselves up for the new consumer opportunities that are going to develop as economies fully recover.”

A tall ask, embraced by 105 companies from startups to some of our best known names. Coffey says the size of the response was surprising, but it showed the “tremendous” demand for research services in New Zealand. It also showed that many businesses might know the problems they face, but don’t know how best to address them.

The judges were looking for novel ideas that had been well thought through with a clear understanding of the path to market. Picking the finalists wasn’t easy. Easily more than a quarter of the entrants merited some form of support, something IRL will be following up this year, says Coffey.

But in the end the 10 finalists were all standouts, both from the needs they identified and how IRL might help them plug those needs.

“The competition showed that if you ask companies what they need, they can tell you, and it’s possible to put in place a programme to service that,” says Garth Carnaby, the competition’s chief judge and president of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Though it might sound a little obvious to a hardened entrepreneur, this about-face finding could have huge implications for the funding of science in New Zealand, says Carnaby. “Companies often don’t understand innovation, or if they do they have quite a narrow view of what they need. But scientists are just as narrow-minded. They work on whatever it is — transition metal chemistry or whatever — and they keep working on it. They don’t necessarily apply it to the paint industry or electric fences or the like.”

IRL’s winning idea was submitted by New Zealand paint manufacturer Resene, which wants to develop a sustainable paint resin not based on oil. If successful, the IRL/Resene research partnership could boost the value of Resene’s paint exports from about $700 a tonne to closer to $6000 a tonne, decrease demand on oil reserves, and take a waste product and turn it into something highly valued.

With IRL on board the project and intellectual property, and thus the returns, stay in New Zealand, says Resene’s technical manager Danusia Wypech. Without the competition, neither partner would have thought of the other, she says.