Christoph Schumacher

I always think sport is a good microcosmos to see what's going on in the real world.

If you want to be successful here in New Zealand, there are no big institutions who support you, but you have individual pockets of brilliance where we have sports people who suddenly win eight gold medals or so at the Olympic Games, but they have done so mainly by themselves.

rather than there be a strategic approach and again that comes down to money issue as well we don't have that much money to fund all these different sports but it's a reflection of what happens in the economy as a whole so i guess it needs a combination we need the business sector to come up and those people who've done well to share with us why and what worked and how it worked but there needs to be the government support and we have had this over the years

Callaghan Innovation and Innovation Grants, but it hasn't really worked.

So we need to figure out what went wrong.

I hope not, but we certainly don't do as much as we could.

What you hear anecdotally has economic reasons.

If an economy is slowing down, it is always related to an increase in unemployment.

And the uncertainty at the moment, I think that's what's driving businesses from just holding back on investments.

Because we don't know where interest rates in the OCR are going.

We don't know what inflation will do.

So companies are cautious.

They're not necessarily expanding or investing, which simply means people find it harder to find jobs.

Which sectors we need to get into?

Well, digital information technology is certainly on the up.

Aged care?

It's something that is pretty resistant because we know the population is getting older.

We know we need more health care.

So that's an area, certainly the whole medical space, medical equipment is certainly part where we can do well and we have done well in the part.

But yes, the direction would probably be more high tech rather than primary healthcare.