Future directions

The development of resources to help startups navigate regulatory issues is motivated by a pressing need for science-based startups to understand the regulatory space (and regulators to understand the science-based startup space). Both founders and those in the commercialisation space have indicated that this information gap is potentially costing startups and the wider economy tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity.

As stated elsewhere in this resource, it is important that new resources do not duplicate work which has already been addressed in other places. Therefore, further work should be based on direct feedback from the wider community of startup founders and emerging MacDiarmid Institute scientist-entrepreneurs. This section collates ideas from respondents for new resources that might generate interest from MacDiarmid Institute founders and help shape future projects. These ideas for new resources include:

Decision tree

A decision tree showing how a specific class of technology could take multiple regulatory routes to market (with caveats and comments around regulatory changes).

• Resources like this exist for more well-established medical technologies, but there are fewer available for other areas of interest to the MacDiarmid Institute, eg clean fuels.

The right questions to ask

A resource which gives a high-level understanding of the right questions for a founder to ask regulatory consultants and/or government officials about regulatory issues they might face.

• This resource could include direct contact details of the most relevant individuals for understanding a particular regulation-related topic.

Feedback to regulators

A resource giving feedback to regulators that focuses heavily on a specific emerging industry that is currently without a clear regulatory pathway. The resource would describe challenges facing startups in that niche, and help regulators to formulate effective regulations for that emerging industry.

Regulatory framework

Development of a regulatory framework for the creation of clusters of related startups in a shared space, where shared regulations are able to cover multiple startups in a cluster, thereby reducing the regulatory burden for individual companies.

• Of particular interest would be the development of shared infrastructure that would usually require an individual startup to undertake a long regulatory approval process.
• This resource could be particularly useful for spinouts from the new NZ public research organisation focused on advanced technologies.