$1.6 million for biotechnology productivity study

$1.6 million for biotechnology sector productivity study

A Victoria University project aiming to identify ways to boost the productivity of the biotechnology and food and beverage sectors has been granted $400,000 per year for four years by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology.

Led by Professor Sally Davenport, the collaborative research project between the University’s Management School, the University of Wollongong and the National Institute of Economic & Social Research (Britain), will study firm resources and capabilities that support moderate to high levels of productivity in the sectors.

Professor Davenport says the project, entitled Building Our Productivity: Understanding Sustainable Collective Productivity in New Zealand Firms, aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of value-generation in a firm as a whole, in order to potentially enhance productivity in these and other sectors.

“We need to shift the productivity emphasis to focus on the firm. Productivity is usually viewed as either a result of individual effort or as an economic measure of a nation’s output relative to inputs but it is from within firms that productivity is driven,” Professor Davenport says.

”Firm-level productivity improvement is as much about the development of innovation, leadership and workplace cultures as it is about objective measurement of inputs and outputs.

“The Minister for Economic Development recently stated that economic transformation must be driven by more globally competitive firms, but it is impossible to improve firm-level productivity without understanding the collectively-held resources and capabilities that underpin greater productivity.”

The collaborative research team will study the firm-level collective productivity in the labour-intensive food and beverage sector, and the biotechnology sector – an innovation and alliance-intensive sector. Two sets of firms will be studied from both sectors. The project is supported by the sectors and findings will be disseminated to sector firms as well as to policy agencies and other relevant groups to support the development of productivity improvement initiatives.

Professor Davenport is Associate Dean (Graduate Studies and Research) of the Faculty of Commerce and Administration and has 15 years experience researching innovation and technology strategy in New Zealand firms.

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