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Time to innovate and win

Last night I watched an interesting, if typically over-hyped piece from 60 Minutes in the USA.

Once you get past the fact that the segment was filled with individuals and companies all pushing their own agendas, it becomes obvious that the "drone" industry is going to be big -- very big.

Here in New Zealand we have a small handful of companies who claim to be heavily involved in the drone industry -- however, on closer inspection, it's pretty clear that most of them are simply assembling stuff using off the shelf components. This isn't the type of business that will allow us to cash in on what has already become a multi-billion dollar market.

I think it's time we took some bold steps and decided to innovate, rather than imitate our way to success in this exploding market.

If you want to get into the drone business there are very few hurdles...

Go online and buy a handful of frames such as these from any number of (usually Chinese) vendors and rebadge them as your own.

Choose from a long (and growing) list of electronics subsystems that perform the essential stabilisation and flight-control functions, throw in some consumer-grade RC gear plus some reasonable lithium batteries and you're now in the "drone business".

The trouble is that you're just another tree in the rapidly growing forest of drone-vendors.

While this approach might work if you only plan to sell to local consumers -- it's not going to enable you to get a foothold in the most lucrative international markets. If you try to export your rebadged imported products you're simply going to be uncompetitive and have no "edge" on your competition.

The secret is to harness the brainpower of smart Kiwis to innovate by creating new paradigms and new technology to support those concepts.

Key of course -- will be breakthrough technologies such as the Sense And Avoid (SAA) system I'm presently working on. If/when I can get this to market it will be the first product of its type to sell at a price-point, weight and size where it becomes practical for small, consumer-level drone craft.

The fact that I'm still sitting on my thumbs waiting for CAA approval to continue my testing is utterly unbelievable and perhaps a great example of why this country is losing its competitive edge in international technology markets.

It seems that at a bureaucratic level we'd rather focus on pie-in-the-sky dreamworld stuff like jetpacks than get in behind really practical, viable products which fill a proven need in the market and have the potential to generate huge expert earnings through the intellectual property they represent.

As I've said so many times before -- I'm not asking for development capital or assistance from the taxpayer -- all I want is for people to stop stopping me from trying to get on with doing what the politicians claim we should all be doing -- creating valuable products that create jobs, generate export earnings and make every one of us richer by way of those receipts.

Oh... and as a side effect -- I'm also trying to make the skies safer and avoid this type of tragedy.

Yes I've written about this situation before but it is intensely frustrating to be sitting on something like this and have to wait what seems like an eternity for people to simply do their jobs.

Does government not want the tax revenues?

Do we not need the export receipts?

Would the jobs created not be important to the country?

Or should we all be content at becoming a nation of "box movers" who simply buy other people's technology, slap our sticker on it and try to re-sell it to unsuspecting dupes while telling our innovators, movers-and-shakers and "ideas guys" to shut up and stop rocking the boat?

Sigh!

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