University of Auckland Business School

Professor Greg Whittred, Dean

"What is critically needed in New Zealand is a strong culture of enterprise and innovation in an environment that stimulates business creation and growth by rewarding risk taking. Start-ups and small to medium sized enterprises often need assistance to plan and organise in order to drive past thresholds, to grow rapidly and enter global markets. Innovations resulting from research in the country’s universities and from R&D in other organisations need to be nurtured and commercialised."

"The University of Auckland Business School is committed to The ICEHOUSE and the services it will provide to start-ups and small to medium sized enterprises focused on rapid growth. To complement the development of The ICEHOUSE the Business School is leading the development of courses in business creation, development and innovation. This is being done in collaboration with the Faculties of Engineering, Science and Medicine. The Business School also has co-operated closely with the BNZ in the development of the Owner Operator Management Programme that will focus on the strategic and threshold issues that small to medium sized businesses face in New Zealand."

The mission of The University of Auckland Business School is twofold. Firstly, the School aims to be recognised as one of Asia-Pacific’s foremost business schools, known for excellence and innovation in research, learning and partnership with enterprise, and for contributions to enhancing New Zealand’s competitiveness and capacity to create wealth and prosperity. Secondly, the School is committed to educating individuals who will contribute to the enlightened management and leadership of private and public sector organisations, and to the development of sound economic and public policy in a globally connected world.

To enhance entrepreneurship, innovation and business growth in small to medium enterprises, the Business School established the ICEHOUSE in conjunction with partners from the BNZ, Boston Consulting Group, Telecom, Ernst & Young, Microsoft and HP. The objective of this initiative was to use the combined talents of the partners to promote research and research-informed teaching in the area of entrepreneurship inside and outside the University and, on a practitioner level, to help globally-focussed start-ups get established and on track to international success.

The Business School supports the ICEHOUSE and other SME-related activities in multiple ways. Several staff conduct SME-related research that is published in a wide range of domestic and international journals. In conjunction with partners, staff collectively design and interpret SME-specific management research. A prime example is the "Clever Companies" survey produced by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the Employers and Manufacturers Association/Northern Division, in conjunction with the Business School. Staff are also encouraged and supported to attend international conferences so as to be up to date on global trends and international best practice with respect to SME’s.

A very significant fraction of the management development programmes and activities of The ICEHOUSE are designed and/or delivered by the staff of the Business School, in both their academic and their SME-consulting roles;

Executive Teaching: Highly-experienced staff, many with substantive business and managerial experience, serve as executive teachers and mentors in various Business School award, degree and executive development programmes focused on SME firms and their challenges;

Field Projects: Postgraduate students work, under the direct academic supervision, on a variety of SME-relevant issues and problems across virtually all business disciplines. Where results are firm-specific and privileged, delivery of their insights is often in the form of a free SME consulting engagement and report. Programmes contributing students to these projects include, the Master of Commerce, Master of Management, and The Auckland MBA(tm).

Summer internships with SME’s are organised in order to produce graduates whose knowledge is relevant to the SME sector and who are more job ready. In turn, these internships provide firms with access to resources to help get jobs done that are important to the development of the company and help raise their management capabilities.

The Graduate School of Enterprise's newest award programme, the Postgraduate Diploma in Business Development, is designed to address directly issues typically encountered by SMEs at different points in their development. Short Courses is the market-leader in the delivery of short-format, high-value management training courses and consist of more than 300 courses on specialised topics of interest to SME organisations and their employees. The Case Research Centre offers published and proprietary management teaching cases suitable for use in SME-focused management development programmes (such as OMP).

New Zealand's pre-eminent research-based management journal, the University of Auckland Business Review, is intended for both a corporate and SME business readership. Its circulation of 75,000 reaches virtually all of the nation's business-related "power structure".

Through these and other avenues, the Business School can significantly leverage its own intellectual resources and knowledge base to address the challenges of enterprise creation and growth in rapidly changing and complex business environments for the specific benefit of the SME sector and, more generally, to deliver on its commitment to improve the capabilities of New Zealand business.