New Zealand’s Tertiary Strategy Aims to Boost Entrepreneurship

The New Zealand government has unveiled its Tertiary Education Strategy 2025–2030, aiming to enhance the country’s entrepreneurial landscape to tackle enduring productivity challenges. The strategy prioritizes fostering innovation, accelerating commercialization, and strengthening entrepreneurial skills within universities and polytechnics. However, aligning these objectives with effective performance metrics poses a significant challenge.

Addressing Market Gaps in Entrepreneurial Education

The strategy identifies critical gaps in market-driven entrepreneurial skills and mandates institutions to expand entrepreneurial education, particularly focusing on graduate researchers. It recognizes an evolving workforce where self-employment, freelancing, and portfolio careers are increasingly common. Complementing these educational goals, a new national intellectual property policy grants academic staff the first right to commercialize government-funded research. This shift indicates a heightened expectation for universities to generate new ventures and technologies.

Despite the ambitious vision, certain elements of the strategy could unintentionally impede the very entrepreneurial pathways it seeks to promote. For instance, the reliance on graduate earnings as a key performance measure raises concerns. Although early-career income serves as an internationally recognized indicator of labor-market relevance, entrepreneurship typically does not yield immediate financial rewards. Founders often face years of variable or low earnings before their ventures reach viability.

Consequently, universities might prioritize producing graduates for established sectors with higher salaries, detracting from the pursuit of entrepreneurial endeavors.

Navigating the Tensions of Labour Market Alignment

The strategy’s strong focus on aligning with the labor market, alongside employer collaboration and responsiveness to current skill shortages, could steer educational institutions towards immediate job preparation rather than future industry demands. Many entrepreneurial opportunities arise in emerging sectors such as synthetic biology, climate technologies, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems. Innovation thrives on exploration and experimentation, which can be stifled by an overemphasis on existing demand.

Moreover, the strategy promotes efficiency and accountability, which can inadvertently reward predictable, linear career paths. Entrepreneurship often entails nonlinear experiences, where students may pause their studies to develop prototypes or pursue new ventures. Under a rigid framework, such actions could be misinterpreted as inefficiencies rather than evidence of ambition.

The strategy’s approach to vocational and foundation learning further emphasizes traditional employment pathways, focusing on work-based training and immediate workforce attachment. This perspective risks marginalizing innovative forms of economic participation, particularly for communities such as Māori and Pacific peoples, where micro-enterprises and social entrepreneurship are essential for economic resilience.

The challenge of industry involvement also looms large. While engaging with employers is crucial, those shaping curricula often represent large, established firms. Their priorities may not align with the needs of emerging industries and smaller enterprises, potentially leading to a curriculum less conducive to disruption and innovation.

Learning from Global Experiences

Other countries, particularly the United Kingdom, have faced similar challenges. The Knowledge Exchange Framework assesses universities based on employment outcomes alongside metrics for commercialization, licensing, community enterprise, and research partnerships. The UK-based Institute for Fiscal Studies advocates for assessing medium-term graduate earnings, suggesting that the highest earnings three to five years post-graduation should be considered, factoring in prior achievements and demographics.

The New Zealand Tertiary Education Strategy outlines various metrics but lacks detailed definitions for these indicators. Clear articulation of these measures will be vital in fostering genuine innovation and entrepreneurship, rather than simply increasing graduation rates.

The strategy sends a positive message about the importance of innovation and entrepreneurial capability for New Zealand’s future. Its focus on commercialization, creativity, and adaptability resonates with international evidence on productivity drivers in modern economies.

Nevertheless, aligning performance measures with the strategy’s ambitious goals is essential. True entrepreneurship does not conform to traditional markers of success, such as high salaries or polished resumés. Instead, it embodies risk-taking, iterative refinement, and long-term value creation, often in a messy and time-consuming manner. If tertiary institutions are primarily evaluated based on conventional, short-term success indicators, they may prioritize safer, more traditional pathways at the expense of fostering true innovation.

In this context, New Zealand’s educational system faces the challenge of promoting entrepreneurship in principle while ensuring that the practical realities of innovation are not constrained.