The Bioeconomy Science Institute enters its second year with a new chief executive, a new chief scientist, and a mandate to turn research into economic gold. With fewer scientists, redirected funding, and a science system critics say is a “burning platform”, expectations have rarely been higher – or the challenges more daunting.
New Zealand’s primary industries will generate an estimated $64.3 billion this year in export revenue. They are the economy’s engine room, and the institute (BSI) – born from the merger of AgResearch, Plant & Food Research, Scion and Landcare Research – was built to run faster, smarter and with greater global ambition.
One year on, with new CEO and returning expat Angus Haslett set to step into the role vacated by transition chief executive Mark Piper, and freshly appointed chief scientist Dr Linda Johnson barely a week into the job, the BSI is ready to put the pain of restructuring behind it and get down to business.
A seasoned agribusiness expert who studied agriculture management at Massey University in the mid-1980s, Haslett most recently headed Netherlands-based dairy genetics company CRV. He joins a similarly sized organisation, but one with far more moving parts.
The 2025 accounts of the four former Crown research institutes show that they generated revenue totalling around $531 million between them, consisting of strategic funding and grants, and government and commercial contracts.
A pivot to mission-led science
The thinking behind the mega-merger was to eliminate duplication and sharpen the commercial focus, building the kind of scale needed to compete internationally and spin out intellectual property ventures and licensing revenue that would grow the bioeconomy.
Johnson, a 23-year veteran of AgResearch with deep expertise in plant-microbe interactions and genomics, says her role is to act as a connector, strategist, and horizon-scanner.
The aim is not to do more science, but to do science differently.
“I don’t see four separate research cultures sharing a letterhead,” she said of the BSI a year on from the merger.
“I see scientists increasingly bringing together expertise, data and resources to tackle challenges that span sectors,” she said.
The BSI is pursuing a missions-led science model, grouping research around large shared challenges rather than institutional silos. Where a Scion wood bioproducts scientist once operated in a separate orbit from a Plant & Food researcher working on biomaterials packaging, the missions framework is explicitly designed to bring them together.
“That’s exactly the sort of collaboration a missions-led approach is designed to encourage,” Johnson says.
“The focus is increasingly on bringing together the right expertise, wherever it sits within the organisation.”
The conversion problem
For Professor Rod McNaughton, academic director of the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Auckland, the structural integration was necessary but only part of the job.
“The BSI has landed in roughly the right conceptual place,” he says, “but the test now is whether it becomes more than an administrative merger. Scale is useful, but scale is not the same as speed.”
“The hard problem is not about the quality of our science, it is conversion,” McNaughton argues.
“I would judge BSI less by how much research it produces and more by how well it improves the conversion rate from science to value.”
The necessary ingredients? Assembling intellectual property, founders, industry partners and capital, moving from research capability to usable technologies, licences, ventures, standards and decision tools. That is a different skill set from running great research labs. While our CRIs had a respectable track record in turning pioneering science into export-earning innovation, the Government is looking to get more bang for the taxpayer’s buck.
The merger resulted in 152 roles going across the four institutes, with another 134 voluntary redundancies, 86 of them science positions. Meanwhile, the investment thesis underpinning the reforms relies heavily on business R&D filling the gap left by strategic science spending being funnelled away from the primary sector and environmental science towards the newly established Institute for Advanced Technology, which is based in Auckland and has a focus on artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, superconductivity and materials science.
A burning platform
Dr Troy Baisden, an environmental scientist, independent researcher and co-president of the New Zealand Association of Scientists, describes the broader science system after the CRI mega-mergers as a “burning platform” – not a crisis coming, but one already underway.
The BSI’s seasoned staff, he says, have done well to hold on to critical capabilities during the restructure. But the reality is that our public researchers are having to do more with less.
Baisden is particularly critical of structural overhead costs that make external co-investment prohibitively expensive.
“The foundations are rickety, poorly funded. Overheads are crazy, so you can’t fund anything from external to these organisations and the government without paying four or five times what it’s worth, so nobody will fund it.”
He worries about the ongoing brain drain from the New Zealand science system, the lack of opportunities for post-doctoral researchers and politicians convinced that merging agricultural science with AI will accelerate economic growth.
“Slogans about doing something differently that’s going to succeed are probably going to prove false, and they’re going to start proving false within three-year election timeframes rather than the five or 10-year timeframe typically applied to science.”
AI as an accelerant
Artificial intelligence is, however, important to BSI’s plans to amplify its science. From genomic selection in plant breeding to biosecurity surveillance, the technology has genuine applications across BSI’s portfolio.
McNaughton is broadly supportive but emphatic that the technology must be embedded in domain expertise rather than dropped in from the outside.
“AI could be especially important if it is grounded in real primary-sector problems and data,” he says, listing faster breeding and phenotyping, biosecurity surveillance, land-use optimisation, provenance and food-process optimisation as high-value applications.
“But AI will not contribute much as a generic capability sitting outside the sector. It needs access to high-quality data, deep domain knowledge, industry adoption pathways, clear IP settings, trusted governance arrangements and people who can translate science into investable or deployable opportunities.”
The gene tech opportunity
One area where BSI could generate upside is precision breeding and gene editing. New Zealand’s regulatory pathway for gene-edited organisms has been slow, a source of frustration for researchers and industry alike. But Johnson, whose own research background is in CRISPR gene editing tools, argues that the regulatory lag need not hold the science back.
“Gene editing adds another powerful tool to that toolbox,” she says.
“International jurisdictions have processes in place that enable proportionate assessment and approval of genetic technologies. That creates both an imperative and an opportunity: to ensure our science remains internationally connected, to learn from regulatory systems offshore, and to position New Zealand to accelerate innovation when domestic settings allow.”
The future of agribusiness, McNaughton points out, is “advanced technology embedded in biological systems”. Think sensing, robotics, digital assurance, climate models, and biomaterials.
“The risk is that funding for advanced technology becomes a separate silo,” he warns.
Baisden acknowledges that there are commercial success stories in the form of spinoff companies that emerged from the BSI’s predecessors, such as Calocurb, a startup that has developed an appetite suppressant and which traces its origins back to Plant & Food’s labs.
The future of New Zealand science, if the Government’s plan works, is to see the likes of Icehouse Ventures and Movac, which recently raised a $200 million venture fund, backing deep tech startups built on BSI’s science.
McNaughton points out that many opportunities in the bioeconomy are not right for startups, but will create value through licences, grower tools, industry adoption, public-good technologies, standards, corporate partnerships or policy evidence.
“The bioeconomy is not the old primary sector with a new label. It is where biology, data, engineering and markets meet,” McNaughton concludes.
“That is why BSI matters, but also why execution will matter more than structure.”