The Canterbury Tech Summit is the highlight of the Christchurch tech calendar and it was amazing that in this crazy covid year the committee and it’s helpers pulled together 250 people for a superb ‘in person’ event. Local, national & global speakers talked about innovation & disruption and it was a great time to catch up with old friends and meet new friends in what is a constantly changing, dynamic & exciting industry.

The speaking line-up….

Innovate and Transform the morning session (8.30am – 1.30pm) wth speakers:

Gabe Rijpma | CEO | Aceso Health | Making health better

Rogan Clarke | Director Digital Change | IRD | Digitising Inland Revenue’s tax ecosystem from the outside-in: Learnings from applying a customer-centric development approach to the development of digital channels

Leena Patel | CEO | Sandbox2boardroom | Raise your innovation IQ

The Next Wave of Applied Technology afternoon session kicked off at 2.00pm - 6.30pm with speakers:

Anna Gong | CEO | Perx Technologies | Re-defining engagement to monetize on customer actions in the digital economy

Grant Ryan | Founding Coordinator | The Cacophany Project | Te Kahu Ora “The cloak of health"

Anna Kominik | Country Director | Wisk New Zealand | Wisk - taking flight to the world

A really great talk from Anna Gong who spoke about how the new ‘Super Apps’ ecosystem in which new tech is leveraging off old enterprise customer bases.

These super apps are providing multiple lifestyle services all in one from B2B & B2C to B2B2C. A real evolution is being seen across Asia utilising the WeChat platform with traditional enterprises bolting on apps to give multiple services to their customers.

There’s only so many mobile subscriptions a Telco can sell or bank accounts & mortgages banks can process, so the growth areas are in the lifestyle apps area. She warned the traditional enterprise will slowly die if If they don’t expand their services & offerings.

Despite Covid, the future was bright with mobile first app offerings and the super apps economy really taking off. Really great talk from Anna thanks so much.

We had an inspiring innovation talk from Leena Patel, CEO sandbox2boardroom online from the US about disruption & creating opportunity.

You are the ‘Strategic co-creator’…you don’t need to have answers but you have to bring ideas from the changing market to the way you operate. Even if you’re the head of marketing, operations, CTO or whatever, we’re all strategic co-creators now.

Here are some key things we need to be thinking about:

Five innovation activities:

Implement new tech for new products
Implement new tech to improve current products
Talent acquisition
New tech to enter new industries
Strategic partnerships

Five Key capabilities for driving innovation:

Capture & develop ideas
Think visually
Communicate in real time asynchronously (Slack etc)
Track & measure engagement & impact
Has to be scaleable

Who would you invite to dinner? You tend to think of the obvious but wouldn’t it be good to Invite people who think differently…

70% of all change initiatives fail...people support changes they’ve created...get them involved early….

An inspiring talk & great points to get us all thinking - thanks so much Leena.

It was great to see Grant Ryan talking about his extremely purposeful pet project (see what I did there) the Cacophony Project to eradicate vermin from New Zealand to allow native birds to thrive by using AI & heat sensor cameras. What a great cause and awesome to see the open source software community rallying around making an extremely positive change to the environment.

The HIT Lab professors Heide Lukosch & Andy Phelps from University of talked about education gaming & resilience and how some of these immersed experiences can help us which was very interesting.

A big thanks to all the other speakers too, each topic was extremely insightful into the different and diverse domains that make up the fascinating IT industry that keeps me challenged every day.

Again another stellar event thanks to all the hard work by the Canterbury Tech Committee, volunteers, speakers and attendees who all made this possible in such uncertain times. My heart goes out to the world with such difficult times in many other countries covid totally sucks.

Now pretty much the whole world is being run on software I feel grateful every day to be working in the technology industry and living in New Zealand.

I'm Paul, I Iove coffee and I’m Founder & Principal Consultant of Sunstone, an IT Recruitment & HR company specialising in recruiting IT roles within software, web, mobile, data, infrastructure, security & networks in Christchurch, South Island of New Zealand.

Canterbury Tech Summit in Christchurch NZ the largest in person tech conference in the world?