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Movers and shakers: Vic Crone of Callaghan Innovation, Clayton Wakefield of TechX and Nathan Bryant-Taukiri of Potentia

Movers and shakers: Vic Crone of Callaghan Innovation, Clayton Wakefield of TechX and Nathan Bryant-Taukiri of Potentia

“As organisations, we have to disrupt ourselves and change ourselves because the pain if you don’t is 10 times worse.”

“As organisations, we have to disrupt ourselves and change ourselves because the pain if you don’t is 10 times worse,” says Callaghan Innovation CEO Vic Crone.

Crone, who spoke at the first Kerridge & Partners leadership series for 2017, says technology and innovation are not just providing new tools for the organisation, they are completely changing leadership paradigms.

Technologies will change the face of New Zealand, she says at the breakfast forum in Auckland. She says technologies that will have a big impact in businesses include drones, 3D printing, blockchain (‘it is a whole new way of transacting with each other’) and big data.

The ability of sensors to collect information and have the computing capacity to analyse it will open us up to a whole new range of decisions, says Crone, who was previously managing director of Xero. She was appointed CEO at the government agency in February.

She says two of the individuals she looks up to are former Telecom CEO Theresa Gattung (“putting herself out there...that was quite inspirational”) and Xero CEO Rod Drury (“he doesn’t care what the naysayers think”).

Clayton Wakefield
Clayton Wakefield

Clayton Wakefield has launched TechX, which he aims to build as New Zealand’s leading independent technology advisory company. “Our aim is to have a team of 25 senior advisors by 2020,” says Wakefield during the launch at the Seafarer’s Club in Britomart, Auckland.

"As an industry we need to help companies achieve better outcomes through and with technology in NZ. TechX is aimed as a trusted advisor to help in that improvement.”

He says the TechX team will provide a range of services including business transformation leadership and independent guidance and mentoring at board and CX level.

Wakefield is an independent board director who has held senior executive roles at ASB and Telecom (now Spark). He was also founder of Techspace, a New Zealand technology company that was acquired by management in 2015.

Nathan Bryant-Taukiri, managing director of Potentia with Taupaki School principal Pete Hall
Nathan Bryant-Taukiri, managing director of Potentia with Taupaki School principal Pete Hall

Recruitment firm Potentia has provided funding for Taupaki School’s “Fearless Future” project, which aims to build pupil’s digital technology and leadership skills.

Taupaki School will receive $10,000 through the Potentia Future Innovators in Tech (FIT) programme.

“As a key contributor to tech-focused careers of many New Zealanders, we're eager to support the next generation of innovators and ensure that this support extends all the way down to the grassroots of the technology sector,” says Nathan Bryant-Taukiri, managing director of Potentia.

Pete Hall, principal of Taupaki school, says the Future Innovators in Tech grant will enable them to significantly boost their digital technology programme.

“The best thing about the Potentia award was the freedom we were given to define the project on our own terms in a way that supported our community. We wanted this to inspire student leadership and bring our teachers and community on a journey that gets them excited and confident learning and experimenting with digital technologies, at school and at home.”

Aamplify client Partner, Warwick Grey and client marketing director Simon Shaw
Aamplify client Partner, Warwick Grey and client marketing director Simon Shaw


Simon Shaw is taking up the newly created role of client marketing director at Aamplify. Shaw hails from a B2B marketing background with over 18 years’ experience on both client and agency side.

The specialist marketing firm has grown from five staff to over 25 in four years with representation in Auckland, Sydney and Melbourne.

Samuel Williams, Aamplify managing partner, also cites the role played by client partner Warwick Grey in growing the company.

“Warwick Grey has been instrumental in our success, both here and offshore and adding Simon to the mix will allow us to offer our clients an even greater depth of marketing expertise,” says Williams.

Geneious Biologics, an enterprise software solution for screening antibodies and related constructs using sequence data, has been launched and is expected to change the way scientists identify antibodies for use in biological drug development.

The Geneious Biologics software platform, by Kiwi company Biomatters, will allow biopharma and biotechnology enterprises to create highly annotated antibody databases, significantly improving their ability to leverage accumulated knowledge and gain insights into trends and relationships that may otherwise have been missed.

“Biopharmaceutical enterprises are generating huge volumes of data in the development of new antibody based therapeutics,” says Jannick Bendtsen, Vice President of Technology Services, Geneious Biologics.

“Geneious Biologics will help them combine and analyse data from different sources and find high-value candidate antibodies much faster than they’ve ever been able to before.”

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