New Zealanders vote on 7 November. Every party will get handed a wish list for backing founders and growing the innovation economy between now and then. We wanted to do something more useful than add to it.
Here are five ideas already running overseas, already tested. New Zealand could adopt any of them now.
1. Australia pays firms to solve a problem it has published
Instead of writing a tender for a product it cannot yet describe, an agency publishes the problem it has and asks who wants a go. That is Australia’s Business Research and Innovation Initiative. The winner gets up to A$100,000 to test an idea over three months, then up to A$1 million to build it, and keeps the intellectual property to sell to the world. The 2021 review found the first round returned A$1.64 for every dollar and recommended expanding it.
Britain has run its Small Business Research Initiative since 2001, more than £1 billion through it at £2.40 back per pound. The United States runs the bigger Small Business Innovation Research programme: a study tracked 7,436 firms and found those just above the funding line were about twice as likely to raise venture capital as near-identical firms just below.
The steal: an Australian-style challenge fund, a fixed slice of each agency’s budget. Labour’s Small Business First aims 15% of contracts at small firms, which shares out work that already exists. This pays someone to invent new solutions.
2. Singapore lets the investors buy the state out
Singapore’s National Research Foundation matches private money into a venture fund, dollar for dollar. A fund that raises S$10 million privately opens with S$20 million. The exit is what makes it work: managers can buy the government’s share back within five years, capital plus interest. Government money leaves within five years; it is not permanent capital.
Britain runs the same idea through the British Business Bank. Ipsos MORI evaluated 14 of its Enterprise Capital Funds in 2021: £651 million raised, almost half of it private. Against managers who applied and were turned down, up to 89% of that money would not have been raised without the state going first. That is £2.80 of private money per public pound, and eight of the 13 managers went on to raise their own funds, £1.9 billion between them.
The steal: cornerstone money with a buyout clause. Labour’s Future Fund and National’s Invest New Zealand both park public money near founders. Neither is built to pull private money in behind it and then step back out.
3. Ireland runs a government agency that invests like a VC
Most governments hand out grants. Ireland invests instead, taking equity stakes in young companies at real volume. PitchBook ranks Enterprise Ireland the most active domestic venture capital investor in Europe and second in the world by deal count. From 2018 to mid-2022 it made 988 investments, 42% more than France’s much larger Bpifrance.
To win its money as a High Potential Start-Up, a company has to show it can create 10 jobs and €1 million of exports within three to four years, and the state co-invests up to €1.2 million alongside private backers. In 2025 that came to €32.9 million across 198 companies, more than half building AI products and 55 led by women. Because Ireland holds a stake rather than walking away, when a company is sold the country shares in the win.
The steal: a public agency mandated to invest like a fund, taking equity at real volume. Our government has already named Enterprise Ireland as the template for Invest New Zealand. Invest New Zealand should copy the behaviour: hundreds of deals a year, each with a stake attached.
4. The UK and Norway built a sandbox that can say yes
A genuinely new idea can be blocked by a rule that was never aimed at it, while the founder waits for a regulator to work out whether it applies. A regulatory sandbox fixes this: a firm tests a real product with real customers while the regulator watches, with set rules relaxed for a set time.
Britain’s financial regulator ran the first in 2016: its early cohorts raised about 15% more over two years, were about 50% more likely to raise anything at all, and got approval about 40% faster. Norway went broader, with sandboxes for AI, public data and finance, each ending in a published report so the next founder does not pay to learn the same lesson. This month Britain’s medicines regulator opened one with a Manchester hospital to test AI medical devices in real clinics.
The steal: a permanent sandbox that covers most regulators and can grant a real exemption. Britain proves the model works; Norway proves it can cover more than one regulator. ACT has floated innovation trials, a Minister suspending set rules in a set place for a set time, “a front door for innovation, not a back door”. The catch: a rule one Minister grants, the next can take back, so it needs to belong in law.
5. A Māori lending fund that recycles its money, the way Canada’s does
Whenua Māori is hard to borrow against. Te Ture Whenua Māori Act protects collectively owned land from being sold, which is the point of it, but it also means a bank cannot take that land as security the way it would a house. The average block has 111 owners. The businesses on that land are offered less credit, and in 2025 the Reserve Bank called it a market failure, a plumbing problem rather than a confidence one. It needs a different kind of lender.
Canada built one. More than 50 Indigenous-owned lending institutions sit under a single body, NACCA, and together they have made around 53,000 loans worth C$3.3 billion over three decades. In 2021 the federal government seeded a C$150 million fund alongside three of its own banks. The money is lent, repaid and lent again rather than granted out and re-argued each Budget. Block, the payments company, was the first private backer, at C$3 million.
The steal: a recycling fund built for whenua Māori, started small. One honest caveat: nobody has run the study yet proving the businesses did better. The problem is well evidenced and the Canadian design is sound.
None of this needs inventing. Every idea here is already running somewhere else, tested, and ready for any party to adopt.
How to get involved
We will be asking each of them which one they would take. Come and hear the answers at our 2026 Innovation Election Debate.
