Business strategy
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| Sirtrack: Durgesh Rangnekar and Jane Tomlins
soldering
components to circuit boards. Image - Rowan Calder |
Manaaki Whenua is New Zealand’s leading crown-owned, independent, science business focused on enhancing the management of terrestrial natural ecosystems and achieving sustainable development. Our Mission, “science making a difference for a truly clean, green and sustainable New Zealand” is being achieved through a portfolio of world-leading research centred on six connected themes: protecting and restoring biodiversity, improving biosecurity and pest management, supporting sustainable rural land-use, assessing greenhouse gas sinks and emissions, improving urban design and development and helping business be more sustainable.
Our research activities are funded through competitive processes managed by our major clients—principally the Foundation for Science Research and Technology but also public sector agencies including the Department of Conservation, the Animal Health Board, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the Ministry for the Environment, and other clients in local government and the private sector. The needs and priorities of these primary funders drive much of our research (see pages 19 & 37).
Our business strategy has two complementary dimensions that will take us forward:
- provide research solutions tailored to customers
- realise the value of discovered intellectual property through its commercialisation.
At present, our contracted research is largely oriented towards delivering information to shape effective public policy and environmental management for the public sector agencies. However, our business strategy will broaden this focus. Manaaki Whenua’s unusual breadth of research capabilities will increasingly enable us to generate proprietary solutions for clients to enhance their environmental performance, social responsibility and—increasingly—profitability. We will continue as leaders in developing and encouraging other businesses to adopt management practices and technologies that underpin sustainable development in New Zealand. Already we have made progress towards this through our sustainable business initiatives—for example, our Enviro-Mark®NZ certifi cation services help businesses manage their environmental, and health and safety activities. This dimension of our business model will both diversify the company’s customer-base and increase our capacity to provide national benefit for the shareholders.
The commercialisation side of our business is steadily building a portfolio of products targeted mostly towards pest management, bioremediation, offsetting greenhouse gas emissions and energy management. Investor interest in environmental technologies is growing strongly—globally the business community is becoming considerably more aware that managing their fi rm’s “environmental footprint” not only enhances current profi ts but, more critically, is intrinsic to future competitiveness. Some of our proofs-of-concepts, currently under development, will lead to technologies that can be packaged into new spin-out businesses to follow a similar growth pathway as Sirtrack (see facing page ); others will be licensed or sold at an early stage to release funds for reinvestment into other projects in the commercialisation pipeline.
The basis for a new business in rodent pest control was established this year through our new wholly-owned subsidiary, Landcare Research US Ltd, which holds 49% of the joint venture company Staron LLC. Our joint venture partner, Genesis Labs LLC, holds the balance. Staron, using intellectual property from our New Zealand-based pest control research, is developing a range of species- specific poisons with much improved safety, humaneness and risks to non-target species than the 20-year old broad-spectrum poison technologies currently available.
To invest in quality of life and environmental care, we:
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