Invercargill Company Awarded $170k for Tech Project

Media Release
Business/Education/Southland
DATE: 7 June 2011
For Immediate Release

Invercargill Company Awarded $170k Grant for Innovative Technology Project

The star continues to rise for local educational publisher and exporter, Essential Resources. The company has just received confirmation of a $170,000 investment from the recently established Ministry of Science and Innovation (formerly the Foundation of Science, Research and Technology) for its new web-based curriculum planning software, Iugo.

“We put our toe in the water last year with a smaller funding application through FRST,” says managing director, Nicola Smith. “Alistair Adam at Venture Southland’s Enterprise Team encouraged us to aim a little higher this time and we are thrilled with the outcome. It was a lot of work, detailing the technological challenges and scoping out the entire project from start to finish, but we’re very satisfied to get the green light."

Essential Resources publishes high quality classroom resources for teachers. Iugo is based on their highly successful Curriculum Planning Made Easy publications. It breaks down the New Zealand primary curriculum into an interactive web tool from which unit and lesson plans can be created.

Teachers access their plans, anywhere, anytime through a web browser. They can also save plans, share plans and work collaboratively with colleagues in their school.

“We receive a lot of feedback on how important, but how time-consuming, school-wide and classroom planning can be and we wanted to create a teacher-focused solution. We’re all about making teachers’ working lives easier, and this is one area where a tool like Iugo can have a real impact,” says Nicola Smith.

Iugo (pronounced: I-U-GO) derives its name from the Latin verb meaning ‘to connect’. The online curriculum planning tool is in interim testing at selected schools and a Version 1 release is on target to go live in October this year, in time to help schools and teachers with their planning for 2012.

Essential Resources was a finalist in the ‘Innovative Approach to Business’ category of the 2010 New Zealand International Business Awards.

//ENDS

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Essential Resources started in late 2000 from the small laundry of an Invercargill family home. With a busy household and four children ranging in age from 2– 8 years, it was the quietest room in Nicola Smith’s house.

From the outset, the vision for Smith and her business partner, Christchurch-based, Geraldine Sloane, was simple: work with the best, most passionate teachers to help make teachers’ working lives easier by providing them with current, innovative, well-designed supplementary teaching materials.

To this day, they live, eat, breathe, sleep and dream about making teachers’ lives easier. It is what underpins the company’s forward momentum. They are early adopters of technological advances for product development, moving into their own digital printing; ebooks; and online content previews.

The early years were lean. With a limited budget, they taught themselves how to build a website; a database; use graphic design software; and the whole publishing process.

Exporting was always part of the plan, but it wasn’t until they first turned a profit in 2004 that they were able to begin their export journey in earnest. They used the profit to attend their first Frankfurt Book Fair as part of the New Zealand publishers stand. The trip taught them a great deal, not least, that the content of their publications footed it with the best. At the same book fair 12 months later, they were paid a somewhat backhanded compliment, when they realised a contact from the year before had ripped off their books. It was a direct lesson in the importance of protecting intellectual property and led to the decision to control growth and hold on to all aspects of production and distribution.

Revenue sales in Australia tripled in 2005 and again in 2006, and continued to grow rapidly. In late 2008, Essential Resources began exporting to the UK and more recently, to Ireland.

Eleven years on, exporting accounts for 65 percent of the turnover with shifts being worked across 20 hours to support varying time zones. A solid 90 percent of New Zealand schools and almost half of all Australian schools are using publications by Essential Resources. Both owners remain very much hands-on: Christchurch-base Sloane as publishing director – working with a range of designers, editors, educators, and authors here and overseas; and Smith managing the team of 26 who work in sales, marketing, and distribution in Invercargill.

For the future, Essential Resources will continue to tenaciously embrace technology innovations and export opportunities – attending overseas trade visits to the UK, Ireland, Frankfurt and elsewhere; growing and creating markets; producing best-quality supplementary educational materials; and always with its sights firmly focused on making teachers’ working lives easier.