Favourite innovation that isn’t yours? 

Lewis Road Chocolate Milk.

Favourite innovation that is yours?

 2Life Concierge App.

Check out this podcast with Mike Hutcheson and Idealog publisher and editorial director Ben Fahy:

Most interesting launch/innovation/trend/thing of the year?

Driverless Cars, Vector/Wero White Water Park.

Lamest launch/innovation/trend/thing of the year?  

NZ Flag Referendum, Lion and Lance Armstrong.

Most promising New Zealand company/companies? 

Synlait, Xero, Kode Biotech.

Heroes?

Pike River Families.

Villains?

Solid Energy, Dreamworld management.

Best stoush?

US elections.

Your own biggest success?

Periodic Table of Innovation  – AUT Practical Innovation Program.

What’s the biggest mistake innovators/businesses will make in 2017? 

Thinking it’s all about tech – when it should be all about humans.

What do you expect to see in the next five years? 

More personalisation and less automation.

What will be dead in five years?

Facebook, traditional banking.

What should be invented and/or un-invented?

Uninvented: Snapchat. Invented; Atomic vaporisers to eliminate cars driving slowly in the fast lane.

Favourite book/TV show/podcast/album/website/magazine/story/performance enhancing drug of the year?

Book: The Half Life of Facts.

One piece of tech you’d have on a desert island?

A knife (some old tech can’t be improved. The snobbery of chronology prevents us from seeing that newer isn’t necessarily better.)

Will the robots become sentient and kill us all? (asking for a friend)

They already are. Metaphorically if not physically.

As you’re enjoying the great outdoors this summer, The Kiwibank Conservation Dogs will be out there too, hard at work, giving our nature a future.