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& Paykel, one of our most
innovative companies, already
well-known for its whiteware
products. The idea was to
create a two-drawer dish-
washer, looking a bit like the
filing cabinets that were ubiq-
uitous in offices in the 1980s.
It would be more ergonomic
than conventional dishwash-
ers, avoiding bending down
as much to load and unload
and washing a single drawer of
dishes and cutlery would use
less water. But it took 10 years
and more than $10 million
in development to perfect the
DishDrawer, which involved
extensive re-engineering of
F&P’s pumps and motors. F&P
was sold to Chinese appliance
maker Haier in 2012, but more
than 20 years on, the Dish-
Drawer remains one of the
company’s hit products both
here and abroad, with about
two million sold to date.XERO 2006
Entrepreneur Rod Drury
found accounting software
clunky and frustrating to use
in the mid-2000s and set out
to reinvent
it, harnessing
the new trend
towards cloud
computing
services. Xero
was born as a
single unified
accounting
ledger, allowing
everyone to see
a company’s
financials all
in one place.
Pivotal to Xero’s success was
winning over accountants
and integrating bank feeds,
invoicing and payroll into
one system. By the end of
2018, Xero had one million
customers in New Zealand and
Australia alone and was one of
the top three accounting soft-
ware companies in the world.
Now listed on the Australian
Stock Exchange, it has a valua-
tion of about $9 billion.ELECTRON ROCKET 2016
Inspired by the Saturn V rocket
that sent men to the Moon
in 1969, engineer Peter Beck
became obsessed with building
a small rocket that could
carry satellites into space. His
company, Rocket Lab, spent
years refining
the carbon-
composite rocket
body of the
Electron and
the Rutherford
engines, which
are based on a
highly efficient
electric-pump-
fed design
that hadn’t
been used for
space rockets
before. With seven flights
from its Māhia Peninsula
launch pad, Rocket Lab has
stolen a march on other rocket
companies, proving that it can
get payloads into orbit around
the Earth quickly and, at a
mere US$5 million per launch,
relatively cheaply.THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY
MARTIN JETPACK 2008
As Kiwi invention stories go, itfollowed the typical narrative.
DIY inventor Glenn Martin
toiled away in his Christch-
urch garage for years trying to
come up with the technology
to allow a person to take to the
sky, Jetsons-style. By 2008, his
Martin Jetpack prototypes had
attracted substantial invest-
ment and things were looking
up.
Technically, the Martin Jet-
pack isn’t a jetpack at all, but a
petrol-engine-powered system
employing large ducting fans
to allow the pilot to hover
above the ground. The com-
pany listed on the NZX and
brought on board a Chinese
investor. But in 2015, Martin
abruptly left the company
he’d founded and the jetpack’s
fortunes went south quickly.
Ultimately, the jetpacks were
too bulky to wear, too fiddly
to fly and too expensive to
manufacture.
Today, the company has
laid off most of its staff and
run out of money and the
new wave of drones, some of
which are being designed to
carry a person, appear to have
rendered the Martin Jetpack
obsolete. lA bungy jump is
now an obligatory
activity for the
more adventurous
visitor to New
Zealand.
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