Peter Griffin

The sooner we close the capability gap, the sooner we’ll reap the benefits.

Labour wants platforms to offer feeds showing only accounts users follow.

On this week’s episode, Peter speaks with Auckland University’s Frank Bloomfield.

In business, and in the innovation game, experience is valuable. But sometimes, not knowing how exactly things are supposed to be done can be a superpower.This week’s episode of The Business of Tech celebrates three young New Zealand designers tackling problems that established businesses have overlooked, with fresh eyes, tight budgets and a willingness to ask basic questions.Sophie West, the national winner of the 2026 James Dyson Award (with around $10,000 in accompanying prize money), and run

Science Investment Plan? You don’t fund a moonshot by cannibalising your launch pad.

As a wake‑up call on artificial intelligence, Raman and Roslansky's book does its job.

NZ's ongoing fossil fuel dependency is an invitation to the next crisis.

Our political cycle still rewards incrementalism and short‑term fixes.

I feel like I’ve spent the year snapping foldable phones open and closed. The format accounts for only about 2% of global smartphone shipments. New models typically debut at more than $3,000. Still, with little innovation left to squeeze into the conventional smartphone, the industry seems hell-bent on making the foldable format stick.The Duo factorApple’s debut of the iPhone Duo this week was somewhat ridiculous given the insane entry-level price tag: $4,199, which makes it a device for the one

The new coalition government has difficult decisions to make about R&D spending.

Peter Beck was never supposed to run a multibillion‑dollar space company from the bottom of the world. A self‑taught engineer without a university degree or NASA pedigree, he turned a childhood obsession with rockets into Rocket Lab, building a Nasdaq-listed business that has made New Zealand the world’s third‑largest launcher of payloads to orbit and which is now racing to become a fully integrated, end‑to‑end space company. The traits that underpin that journey are as distinctive as Rocket Lab

New Zealand’s science sector spent its lunch hour on Tuesday doing what it does best under duress: watching politely while politicians riff about its future shape and design.The Save Science Coalition’s pre-election panel at Victoria University drew The Opportunity Party candidate Ben Wylie-van Eerd, New Zealand First list MP Dr David Wilson, Labour’s science, technology and innovation shadow spokesperson and MP for Christchurch East Reuben Davidson, and Green Party list MP Scott Willis. Two sea

The BusinessDesk CEO Index, driven by Range Rover, has returned for its second year. Our newsroom and a panel of independent judges have hand-picked 24 New Zealand chief executives and business leaders making a real impact in their sectors and beyond. This profile features one of 2026’s finalists.Peter Beck was never supposed to run a multibillion‑dollar space company from the bottom of the world. A self‑taught engineer without a university degree or Nasa pedigree, he turned a childhood obsessio

BSI cut 238 roles as it shifted to a missions-led model of science.

New Zealand expat tech entrepreneurs are absolutely killing it on the world stage at the moment, innovating in artificial intelligence and raising huge capital rounds to fund their ambitions.Last week, it was Jeff Hawke's turn, whose company Odyssey simulates the real world to make AI systems more useful, raising US$310 million (NZ$529m) in a Series B round that valued the business at US$1.45 billion.Hawke used to work with University of Auckland graduate Alex Kendall at Wayve, the London-based

By Josh Chin, Merrill Sherman, Jason French and Ievgenia SivorkaWith drones revolutionising the battlefield in Ukraine, Iran and beyond, the US is striving to dominate this latest evolution in military technology the way it has with previous wartime innovations. There is just one problem: China got there first.Teardowns of drones recovered in Ukraine hint at the extent of China’s stranglehold on production. A recent dissection of a Russian first-person-view, or FPV, quadcopter by the Bulava unit

Apple’s budget laptop threatens to take another bite out of the Windows market.

Big organisations love to talk about innovation. They set up labs, hire “transformation” teams, and run hackathons. Yet inside many companies, the best ideas still die in PowerPoint decks or get buried in cautious business cases.In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to Gravity cofounder James Boult, an innovation specialist who has spent years inside large New Zealand organisations, watching this play out in real time. Boult’s verdict is that most corporates are structurally set

The national research advice from the Prime Minister’s Science, Innovation and Technology Advisory Council that dropped last week, on April Fool’s Day, was no joke.It sent a clear message to the research sector that the Government wants to go big in advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence, quantum, synthetic biology, and aerospace. It leans hard into a “Technology for Prosperity” priority. The investment plan comes at the expense of the three other pillars we are now grouping scie

TechNZ’s new Tech & Innovation Manifesto 2026 reads less like a lobbying document and more like the national tech strategy ministers ponder but never deliver.It starts with a familiar and grim diagnosis – lagging productivity, a projected labour shortfall of at least 250,000 people by 2045, and a growing infrastructure deficit, all while our best tech firms and talent drift offshore in search of capital.It’s a situation that requires a coherent response, a compelling vision and strategy backed b