The New Frontiers Festival hosted by the Hillary Institute this week in Upper Hutt gave me real hope that New Zealand can achieve the much-needed
and complex transition to a new type of economy. The timing of the festival was impeccable as this week Jacinda Ardern confirmed that the 2018 Budget will include a renewed commitment to address pressing
environmental and social issues facing New Zealand by transitioning to a stronger, more resilient and fairer economy. This announcement was followed by a further announcement the Government will cease issuing offshore oil exploration permits, showing the Government really is serious about a transition to a carbon neutral economy. However, the Government
cannot hope to achieve this task in isolation, it will require collaboration with determined impact-minded entrepreneurs
and connections to top global talent and capital. I left the New Frontiers festival feeling inspired by the potential of
the many attendees who are well on their way to connecting and co-creating impactful social enterprises to help drive
this transition forward in parallel with better government policy settings.
New Frontiers Festival attendees - a diverse crowd
New Frontiers is an annual three-day long co-created full immersion event showcasing the work of the Institute’s Edmund Hillary Fellowship. This fellowship involves an innovative world-first Global Impact Visa launched in partnership with Immigration New
Zealand to attract top global and New Zealand talent in the ‘impact’ or ‘social enterprise’ space to Aotearoa. Up to 50
international and 10 Kiwi Fellows are accepted into a cohort every six months, and are provided with individualised
support and access to world-class mentors, retreats, and events to maximise impact. The first two cohorts are currently
underway with applications now open for the third cohort. The festival involved participants from all stages of this
fellowship timeline as well as other local and international entrepreneurs seeking to connect with and share knowledge
with participants.
I was clearly not alone in feeling the inspiration of being surrounded by such well-intentioned and capable people with
shared goals of helping New Zealand’s transition. The fact that over 300 people applied for the first global impact visa
round and that 250 people (many of them foreigners) attended this year’s festival, demonstrates how highly New Zealand
is regarded internationally, both as a great place to live and as a country offering opportunities to pursue innovative
and cutting edge projects. I was amazed by the array of talented people from all corners of the world I met at the
festival who either have already joined the programme, or want to do so. One German entrepreneur and prospective
participant had traveled all the way here for the festival and told me he was struck by how ‘wide open’ NZ is in terms
of geographical space but also in terms of the opportunities that exist here to do positive work. There was a palpable
sense of hopefulness and positivity at New Frontiers and a sense that New Zealand is currently on the verge of a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to address core questions around of how we can create a more sustainable, resilient and
more equal society.
Perhaps this hopeful feeling exists because New Frontiers clearly demonstrates to all in attendance what fertile ground
for potentially transformational future solutions can emerge through targeted collaboration between top global and local
Kiwi entrepreneurs. There is so much potential for collaboration or partnerships to harness the best of local knowledge
and international best practice. Foreign attendees, for example, may have experience and connections in key areas that
Kiwi participants are working on and vice-versa. As EHF Content & Communications Lead Alina Siegfried wrote last year:
The festival of creativity and entrepreneurialism is always a magic time of fortuitous collisions of leaders from all
fields, and cross pollination of bold ideas to build better futures and create a positive impact in the world.
New Frontiers Festival Attendees Mixing at the start of day 1
The Challenge
It certainly wasn’t all feel good and happy clappy vibes, there was a real sense of urgency instilled in this event by
the day one keynote speaker and the Hillary Institute's 2017 global Hillary Laureate Johan Rockström. Rockström is Founding Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Chair of the Eat Forum, author of “Big World, Small Planet”, and advisor to over 20 global governments. He outlined how humanity has now moved
from the holocene period to the ‘anthropocene’ and that there is now no doubt amongst the scientific community that we
are reaching reaching the hardwired biophysical ceilings of the planet. He said there has never been so much evidence of
the risk of destabilising the entire planetary system, but simultaneously there has also never been more reason to be
hopeful due to increasing evidence of a new renaissance to address these problems.
Johan Rockström - the Hillary Institute's 2017 global Hillary Laureate
Rockström believes that if we want to remain in Holocene-like conditions (without massively devastating warming
impacts), we have a chance, but that to do so, we need to transition rapidly (in a single generation). He calls for more
awareness of this ‘planetary boundary framework’ as a new framework for sustainability and calls for us to become
planetary stewards adopting an indigenous worldview of stewardship or ‘kaitiakitanga’ viewing the planet as
interconnected and humanity as a part of this system. He concluded by calling for humanity to become ‘planetary
stewards’ which involves adopting an indigenous worldview of ‘kaitiakitanga’ and viewing the planet as interconnected
and seeing humanity as a part of this system.
This important keynote address laid down quite a challenge to the event’s attendees as it did not gloss over the real
urgency of the issues we face, but gave hope and a potential pathway forward. EHF co-founder Matthew Monahan similarly
laid down a challenge in his opening address, encouraging all attendees to take on the ‘wicked problems’ we face as a
nation and planet through adopting a systemic approach:
To change one thing you need to change everything.
A number of EHF fellows gave short ‘elevator pitches’ for their proposed projects over the three days of the festival.
These ideas represented a wide range of inspirational projects including:
• Laina Raveendran Greene’s enterprise supporting local women heroes running innovative small and medium social
enterprises
•Chris Wake’s idea to use space industry mini-satellite technology for shipping and weather data collection
• Former Twitter tech-lead and Indymedia founder Evan Henshaw-Plath’s ideas around creating more participatory
media
• Andrea Corovos idea of building an open-source platform for digital biomarkers and digital medicine
• Bex De Prospo and Peter Randrup’s idea of establishing insects as an environmentally sustainable protein
alternative in NZ
• South African Spencer Horne’s idea seeking to reshape logistics to reach the bottom billion
•Dina Buchbinder Auron’s idea of using the power of play to form more engaged global citizens,
• Joey Krug’s idea of using the blockchain and p2p exchange to lower the barrier of entry to financial markets and
level the playing field
• Sarah Grant’s idea of creating a global teacher movement for education equality
• Geoff Sharples idea of enabling models for equitable clean energy access in NZ to scale globally
•Vicky Robertson from the NZ Ministry for the Environment is also a fellow and seeks to lead change in New Zealand’s public sector to
safeguard our natural environment
• Kiwi James Mansell seeks to shift the focus of the state sector from service delivery towards outcomes through reimagining ‘social
investment’ or ‘collective impact investment’.
There were so many more amazing ideas and these are only a taste of what is no doubt to come as EHF keeps stacking
cohorts of impact minded entrepreneurs on top of each other and giving them the space and tools to collaborate and make
their ideas a reality over a three year period. I look forward to sharing more content from this inspirational event
over the coming month as it is available and to seeing these projects develop. It would be great to see the Government
giving more support to innovative programmes such as EHF which seek to take some of the burden off public services by
creating impactful social enterprises that support their ambitions for a transitional economy. It seems to me that a
small seed investment in a fund to support such entrepreneurs could have far more impact than many traditional
government investment strategies in solving these ‘wicked problems’.