The Metros’ Group of ITPs has taken a major positive step with the launch of their Innovating New Zealand website (see Metros’ media release here), which “will connect companies with a range of services, expert advice and staff training”. The site has been launched in cooperation with Business NZ and forms part of their new ManufacturingNZ site (see Business NZ media release here). Massey University is leading a similar university contribution to the wider site, through the Manufacturing Knowledge Here site, which covers six universities (not Lincoln or Auckland). The overall project is designed to help manufacturers lift their game.

This new initiative shows that the Metros are starting to fulfil some of the promise they had when they broke away from ITPNZ (which I worked for at the time), which then represented all 20 ITPs, to form their own group. NZITP (which now represents the other 14 ITPs) has not done much in public to date, but this latest announcement and the joint BEngTech degree certainly puts the Metros on the map. Other ITPs will be able to join Innovating New Zealand from 2011.

This is a very important development in the ITP sector, as ITPs have struggled to work cooperatively on national initiatives. The Metros’ Group now has two such initiatives under their belt and this latest one has considerable potential to reposition the sector as a credible national partner for business, rather than a set of individual regional institutions. The negative views about ITPs amongst national business groups cannot be underestimated – there is real goodwill there, but an exasperation that ITPs can’t offer a credible common response to business concerns. In that environment, the new site has real potential – it just needs to work now.

I’d also like to recognise TEC’s role in all of this. TEC funded the Metros to link up their commercialisation/research arms last year and this project is an outcome of that. For too long, ITPs have had an applied research role, but have not really had any funding or encouragement to pursue it. The ITPs have also been quite uneven, offering strong support in one area but no support in another. This TEC-supported project seems like a sensible way to build scale and coverage by leveraging the expertise of ITPs around the country, so that expertise in one area can be shared across NZ. It is the sort of cooperation that will be needed to make the new qualifications approach work too – and that will be much harder as teaching makes up about 99% of ITPs’ activities, while commercial research is less than 1%. But this is a bloody good start.

PS The universities have done a good thing too, but I encouraged them back in May about cooperative commercialisation work.