An untapped asset capable of transforming our economy

Comment: New Zealand needs to find new and better ways of producing resources such as food, feed and fibre. To name a few, our economy is struggling, many of our natural ecosystems are unhealthy, and people are facing cost-of-living and housing crises. It feels a bit doom and gloom right now, with much of the focus on the negative rather than how we can forge a new direction.
I think the biggest beacon of light, and our most significant untapped asset, is our vast ocean estate.  
The key is science and inspiring people to collaborate and invest in science that informs how we sustainably grow, harvest and process a variety of marine organisms, and then turn those organisms into valuable nutrient-rich foods, medicines and construction materials.
In my view, we could lead the world in the ethical production of marine bioresources, transforming our economy, environment, and society – we just need to get out of our own way and work together to address some of the main barriers that are holding us back. 
If we take New Zealand’s fledgling seaweed sector as an example, it’s clear there is a shared need for research to develop unique and sought-after products, to stand up research and development (R&D) and processing facilities and infrastructure, and to ensure safety of the products and access to export markets. This will require extensive industry and science collaboration; however, there’s no current framework for the kind of collaboration.
From a science system perspective, it seems there are lots of people out there trying to figure out how to grow seaweed, without a clear strategy for scalable commercialisation of this R&D.     
This month at the Aquaculture NZ Conference, Cawthron chief executive Volker Kuntzsch and Plant & Food Research chief executive Mark Piper made the case that a $100m yearly investment over 10 years had the potential to grow the aquaculture industry from $2.5b to $10b in the next decade. They also explained how both organisations were committed to improving collaboration across the sector to ensure return on investment. It might seem like a large number, but it’s in the range of what Fonterra alone spends on R&D, and this investment supported strong dairy industry growth from $2b to $20b in 30 years.
With New Zealand’s research, science and innovation system currently under review, now is the time to consider how we can better provide the knowledge and technology required to start producing marine bioresources at meaningful scale in an environmentally responsible way. In my view, a national marine bioresources innovation platform would help fill fundamental knowledge gaps about our oceans and the species that live in them.
At present, we only know how to grow a handful of species – predominantly fish and shellfish (e.g. GreenshellTM, Pacific oysters, salmon) – but we need to expand our knowledge on how to grow other species including microalgae and seaweed, understanding their nutrient, bioactive, and physical composition, and developing pathways to turn them into valuable products. 
We have in mind an innovation platform that is similar in form to the Cooperative Research Centre model used in Australia. These models are large-scale flagship centres that focus on specific missions the Australian government and industry wish to accelerate. They represent a genuine public-private partnership model which involves investment from government and industry, with companies effectively ‘buying-in’ to an R&D ecosystem. We envisage a medium- to long-term model – at least 10 years – in which innovation projects are co-designed by industry and science organisations to produce real-world outcomes including viable commercial offerings.
Government investment would support critical underpinning science, such as ensuring the safety of the bio-products, environmental protection, and the development of national infrastructure.
We’re far from that kind of coordinated, strategic approach at present – if I’m honest, it’s a bit of a mess. While there is incredible work happening in pockets across our research, science and innovation system, there is so much overlap, competition and bureaucracy, that examples of successful real-world application of R&D innovation are few and far between. A perverse outcome of this system is that we struggle to fund our core infrastructure, which is nationally significant, and critical for the success of the marine bioresources sector, and yet undervalued by all actors in the system. I’m the first to admit that Cawthron is part of that problem, but unfortunately, we don’t have an alternative. To secure science funding, we must compete with Crown Research Institutes and universities for the same pots of money in the same fields of research. Just to put it in perspective, we suspect that New Zealand’s research system probably spends more applying for contestable funding from the government than it receives back. Roughly $39m a year is allocated to New Zealand’s largest contestable science fund (the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s Endeavour Programme), but with 137 applications submitted in 2024, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each to prepare, the total cost to the system is likely to be close to, if not more than, $39m.
To reference the seaweed sector example I used above, Cawthron is currently one of between five-10 organisations we know of in New Zealand receiving government funding via multiple avenues for foundational science that aims to enable seaweed farming, and yet these individual programmes of research are not joined up. In addition, there are no dedicated non-contestable funds to develop fundamental knowledge, expertise and infrastructure for seaweed and underpin commercial, cultural and environmentally restorative efforts. In a country as small as New Zealand, this doesn’t really make sense. 
Our experience leading national research platforms has taught us that genuine collaboration is the key to ensuring science delivers value to society. This is particularly important when taxpayers are funding the science. We have seen the impact of genuine partnership in our work leading the Shellfish Aquaculture Research Platform with industry partners at Cawthron Aquaculture Park in Nelson – a shared facility that is a national research and innovation hub. The foundational science our team of researchers did to close the life cycle of the GreenshellTM mussel and develop nursery technology for the mussel and oyster sectors resulted in a secure spat supply to industry for the first time, and the establishment of two on-site shellfish hatcheries operated by Moana Oysters and SpatNZ. The site also hosts FlipFarm Systems, which produces oyster-farming technologies, and teaching laboratories for aquaculture students enrolled at the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology. Cawthron would love to see other research institutes housed at the park – we are keen to have experts from the Crown Research Institutes and the universities on site and using our nationally important infrastructure – but we do need the system to support the spirit of collaboration and not pit us in competition against one another. 
Having an ‘innovation platform’ would also help us overcome another big hurdle to success – attracting investment. Cawthron has been proactively pitching R&D investment opportunities to both domestic and multinational companies, but we repeatedly hear that while the pitch is sound, New Zealand’s operating environment is high-risk, bureaucratic and at times, chaotic. If we go back to the seaweed example once more, prospective investors in NZ ventures have complained that there are major barriers to scalability, including a lack of clarity on export requirements, different consent requirements for farming in different regions, and again, a huge amount of competition and overlap for such a small market. 
The Government has been reviewing our regulatory environment, particularly with respect to marine resource consents. While I don’t support all proposed changes, I acknowledge there is a real need to create a more attractive investment landscape to remove those barriers – competition that creates market inefficiency, a lack of collaboration and strategic coordination, and a prohibitive regulatory environment – then we might finally be able to attract the level of investment that enables us to expand and grow our portfolio of marine industries for the benefit of our people and environment.