Get off the Grass

Overview

In a brilliant intellectual adventure that ranges from David Ricardo and Adam Smith to economic geography and the science of complex networks, Shaun Hendy and Paul Callaghan explore how New Zealanders can learn to live off knowledge rather than nature. The key to increasing New Zealand’s prosperity, they argue, is innovation in high-tech niches. To catch up with the countries that lure young Kiwis away, New Zealand needs to start innovating like a city of four million people; it needs to start taking science seriously; it needs to start seeing its people as people of learning, not just of the land. Get off the Grass provides a readable introduction to a wide variety of ideas including economic geography, network theory, and complexity theory; offers unique insights into the New Zealand economy and its long-term prospects; adds to current debates worldwide about innovation, science, economic growth, and networks.

Reviews

“This is an important book on where we have come from, who we are, and where we need to go. Based on an accessible discussion about the drivers of economic growth, it provides a valuable account of the significant challenges and substantial opportunities that New Zealand has.”  —Dr. David Skilling, director, Landfall Strategy Group–Singapore

“Callaghan and Hendy have highlighted a critical issue—decades in which we have underinvested in both public and private sector investment in technological research and innovation. This is a welcome and timely contribution to the critical debate on how we are to become a more wealthy and healthy society.”  —Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister

Author Biography

Shaun Hendy is the former deputy director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials & Nanotechnology at Victoria University of Wellington and is an industry and outreach fellow at Callaghan Innovation. In 2010 he was awarded the New Zealand Association of Scientists Research Medal and in 2012 he won the Callaghan Medal and the Prime Minister’s Science Media Communication Prize. He is a sought-after commentator on science and innovation matters who has published more than 80 scientific articles, writes the blog A Measure of Science, and has a regular physics slot on Radio New Zealand Nights. Paul Callaghan was one of New Zealand’s most successful and internationally renowned scientists. He was the founding director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, the Alan MacDiarmid Professor of Physical Science at Victoria University of Wellington, and a founding director of Magritek, a company that sells nuclear magnetic resonance instruments. He published more than 240 articles in scientific journals and several books including Wool to Weta, on the potential for science and technology entrepreneurialism to diversify New Zealand’s economy. In 2010 he was awarded the Günther Laukien Prize for Magnetic Resonance and shared the Prime Minister’s Science Prize. In 2011 he was named the Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year.