Insights from the 2026 Life Sciences Summit roundtable discussion hosted by the Biotechnologies Group, bringing together more than 100 leaders across science, industry and policy.

Scaling innovation from research to commercial success in New Zealand is hard. At the Life Sciences Summit, Ella Reshef and the Biotechnologies Group team explored the obstacles and solutions that could transform our life science industry during a roundtable discussion with over 100 leaders, experts, scientists, policy makers, commercialisation professionals and operators.

Success factors

We first asked those leaders to define the factors that have accelerated past success, and two levers were clear: a validated market and money. These are crucial for any business to succeed – there needs to be real demand for a product, and investment to build it.

If we look deeper into what successful life science companies have in common, however, we see other important enablers: strong science foundations and disciplined strategy, executed by highly skilled people, in collaboration with the right partners.

Successful companies also have external support: access to technical and commercial capability, enabling regulations, IP protection and brand visibility are crucial.

New Zealand itself also has some huge advantages: world-class R&D, a beautiful country that attracts talent from around the world, ranked one of the top countries in the world to do business, and access to quality bioresources.

What’s stopping our life science industry from thriving?

When over 100 leaders and experts in the life science industry convene to share their lived obstacles in scaling science and innovation, what do they say? It’s clear there are both internal company challenges and greater systematic obstacles blocking companies from successfully scaling innovation.

New Zealand’s risk-averse culture is one factor that blocks our pathway to scale. We heard that our conservative regulations make it harder to commercialise here than to go offshore. Capital constraints also affect willingness to take true innovation risks, leading to incremental innovation, instead of breakthroughs. Combined with high equity stakes at early venture capital stages (sometimes up to 40% at seed rounds), this slows the fundamental driver of progress – trying and failing.

New Zealand has top-rated science, engineering and medical schools internationally. But our talent pool is dwindling. Why? Two reasons: early-career talent can go abroad for better career progression, and technical experts may not be learning the translational skills to succeed in the commercial world.

There are small pockets of influence working to overcome this mismatch between education and industry. MBIE’s applied PhD scheme is a helpful start, as is the successful Bioscience Enterprise degree at the University of Auckland. However, talent capability remains a major bottleneck, pointing to a systematic failure to invest in people ready for commercial innovation.

Our limited domestic market and distance to export markets were identified by many experts as constraining scale-up. Our small size could be put to our advantage, and yet dispersed infrastructure, lack of innovation clusters and ecosystems, and fragmented support were also identified as barriers to success.