A nation as innovative as New Zealand thinks it is should be a world class economic performer. That we arenât is a perplexing puzzle â one that is maybe starting to paralyse our thinking.

Our instinct is to blame our under-performance on things we are familiar with â like distance from market, our small size, scarcity of capital, institutional arrangements, and more recently McCannâs economic geography. Yet when you dig, these factors do not provide a complete and compelling answer to the puzzle. There are still some missing pieces. What is going on in our heads â the way we think about innovation, about management, about engaging with other people - fills in a lot of the missing pieces. Our Kiwi mindset causes us to unwittingly think and behave in a particular way that is a barrier to creating and harvesting maximum value from our business efforts â even though we work long and hard.

None-the-less we rely upon economic models and management theory and practice that is grounded in an assumption of maximising behaviour and that treats innovation and management as technical rather than psychological and social processes. There is a reputable body of academic research and literature showing a correlation between innovation outcomes and national culture. National culture is an important factor in determining how people from one nation think differently to people from another nation. In our case it determines our Kiwi mindset or psyche. National culture can be measured and ranked. New Zealand has been included in four international studies. Despite taking quite different approaches and using different samples, the results and conclusions are remarkably similar. Kiwi culture means that we are more motivated by and gain more satisfaction from starting new things (including invention), than it does from turning that invention into productivity and profit.

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