Up-and-coming leaders of New Zealand’s primary sector are frustrated by the lack of collaboration between industry players. KPMG’s 2015 Agribusiness Agenda volume 2, sought the views of the primary sector’s emerging leaders, surveying more than 50 young leaders at a one-day Summit at the Chrysalis Innovation Studio in Auckland earlier in the year.

There’s a real sense of frustration among young leaders in the sector, according to Justine Fitzmaurice, a Senior Manager at KPMG who advises agribusiness companies.

“They cannot understand why current leaders are not collaborating in a meaningful way – and combining their resources for the benefit of everyone across R&D, marketing, processing or distribution. Instead, we have companies continuing to work in silos. The message we got from young leaders is that they are exasperated by the duplication and sheer waste of it all.”

KPMG’s Julia Jones, who co-authored the Agenda with Justine Fitzmaurice, says the word ‘trust’ came up many times during the Summit discussions.

“Emerging leaders believe that existing leaders, particularly those in like industries, need to shut the door on the past and learn to trust each other. For example, they’re dismayed by the ‘street fighting’ that currently occurs among companies in New Zealand’s red meat sector,” she says.

“They want to see us working together to gain market advantage against our international competitors; not competing against each other to needlessly drive prices down for everyone in New Zealand.”

As Julia Jones explains, the generation of under-30s view collaboration as a natural way of doing business.

“Collaboration is their modus operandi....they’ve gone through an education system that’s based on achieving outcomes in groups. For them, it’s just a normal way of working – and they believe it should be part of everyday business.”

One of the guest speakers at the Summit, Professor Kaj Storbacka, reinforced the need for New Zealand’s primary sector to develop a collaborative strategy. He advocates the concept of market-shaping; which is essentially creating your desired market, rather than following an existing one.

“Competitive strategy is not the silver bullet,” Professor Storbacka told the group. “Those who want to shape markets need to engage in collaborative strategy.”

• The emerging leaders called for New Zealand to reach a consensus on the use of genetic modification. While opinions were divided on whether the best strategy was to embrace GM, or be GM-free – all agreed a decision was needed urgently.
  
• Emerging leaders want to see a single cohesive ‘NZ Inc’ brand that can be used by all NZ-produced products that meet its accreditation criteria.
  
• New Zealand companies should be gaining insights into the needs of the 2035 consumer – utilising a range of social and scientific disciplines – instead of conducting traditional market research into the consumer of today.
  
• The use of flexible or modular processing plants has the potential to create new efficiencies across our processing sector.