New Zealand Business Excellence Conference
Founded by the Rt Honourable Sir James Bolger, Sir Douglas Myers and a number of prominent private and public business leaders, the New Zealand Business Excellence Foundation (NZBEF) was created to improve the overall performance and productivity of New Zealand’s organisations as well as celebrate success through the establishment of New Zealand’s premier business excellence awards.
The Conference comprises of two mornings of outstanding speakers – this year the theme is “Improvement” with a bias towards NZ productivity as appropriate – the afternoons are given over on the first day to the 2nd New Zealand Best Practice Competition and then on the second day the 7th International Best Practice Competition. The winners of the NZ Best Practice Competition will be announced at the early evening networking event on 10th May and the winners of the International Best Practice Competition straight after the last competitors finish on the late afternoon of 11th May.
The organisers are the New Zealand Business Excellence Foundation, their Sponsors - Complete Learning & The New Zealand Defence Force. The Support Partners are The International Quality Management Group (IQM), the Centre for Organisational Excellence Research and QLBS.
Aimed at C-Suite executives, Senior Management and Practitioners who are seeking insight into best practices both in NZ and abroad, this event will also be equally enlightening for consultants, experts, researchers, policy advisors and anyone else that wants to achieve operational excellence.
On Tuesday 11 May, Geoff Lewis from the Productivity Commission will present on Unlocking New Zealand’s productivity potential: the key role of frontier firms.
New Zealand’s productivity record is poor. Our small domestic market and distant location makes it difficult and risky for businesses to get the scale required to be world class in their industry. Yet geography is not destiny, so how can New Zealand lift its game?
Geoff Lewis will share the key findings and recommendations from the Commission’s recently released report on New Zealand’s frontier firms. On average, New Zealand’s most productive or “frontier firms” have productivity levels less than half that found in their counterparts in other small advanced economies. So what can we learn from other small advanced economies? What are the priority actions for Government to maximise the economic contribution of frontier firms? And what regulatory or policy changes are needed to unlock productivity gains across the economy?