New tertiary plan's blind spot; the myriad roles of the humanities

When the Government released its Tertiary Education Strategy 2025-2030 this week, it outlined a significant ambition: universities and polytechnics must now play a direct role in enhancing New Zealand’s productivity and strengthening the country’s innovation performance.

It is the boldest tertiary policy shift in years. But buried inside the strategy is a structural blind spot. It describes in detail how science, technology and commercialisation are expected to drive growth. Yet it says almost nothing about how the arts, humanities and social sciences (AHSS) will contribute, despite the fact that the strategy’s objectives cannot be met without them.
This omission matters. It determines where funding pressure will fall, how the Tertiary Education Commission will interpret performance, how universities will respond, and ultimately how the system will define innovation.

The strategy itself is not hostile to the AHSS disciplines. It simply does not see them. And in policy design, invisibility has consequences.

Innovation in modern economies is built on intangible assets and complex human capabilities. New Zealand’s World Intellectual Property Organisation Global Innovation Index data makes this clear. The country ranks 29th globally for ‘creative outputs’, outperforming far wealthier and more research-intensive nations. This pillar encompasses intangible assets, creative goods and services, and online creativity, which draw directly on the AHSS disciplines.

Meanwhile, our ranking of 41st for ‘knowledge and technology outputs’, the traditional STEM-heavy measure, is much lower.

The same pattern can also be seen in the private sector. According to the report, Xero’s intangible-asset intensity is 98 percent, and Fisher & Paykel Healthcare’s is 90 percent. These companies succeed not only because of technical excellence, but because of design, customer insight, organisational capability and brand. These contributions originate from the social sciences, business disciplines, psychology, cultural studies, and the creative arts.

Māori and Pacific innovation often takes intangible forms too: design-driven enterprise, cultural IP, service innovation, community governance and kaupapa-centred business models. These are central to New Zealand’s economic identity and global differentiation.

The strategy doesn’t explicitly recognise this. Its definition of innovation rests almost entirely on STEM-coded concepts: commercialisation pipelines, applied research, industry co-design and labour-market alignment.

The structure of the strategy reinforces that emphasis. Most of the detailed expectations sit with science, engineering, technology and health. By contrast, the arts, humanities and social sciences appear nowhere except implicitly in broad references to ‘equity’, ‘communities’ or ‘learner success’.

Yet it is the AHSS disciplines that seek to understand how technologies are adopted, whether innovation spreads, whether regulation and governance are keeping pace, if services are designed well, and whether organisations develop the managerial capability that productivity requires.

New Zealand’s technology adoption challenges, ranging from the slow diffusion of digital tools to uneven uptake of AI, are not technical failures. They are behavioural, cultural, managerial and institutional. In other words, they are social-science challenges. Innovation does not reach the economy simply through invention. It moves through people, firms, incentives, meaning and trust.

Internationally, OpenText, now one of Canada’s largest software companies, came out of an English department project at the University of Waterloo to put the Oxford Dictionary online.

New Zealand has also produced ventures originating from the AHSS disciplines, although they can be harder to spot because they often employ different business models. The creative-tech sector, education technology, behavioural insights firms, Indigenous design companies, digital heritage platforms and policy analytics start-ups all emerge from expertise in the social sciences, humanities and creative arts.

The country’s globally recognised film and visual effects industry is an example. Wētā FX, one of the world’s most successful screen technology companies, depends not only on advanced computing and engineering, but also on storytelling, design, digital humanities, creative production and cultural imagination.

Innovation can begin in places our policy frameworks aren’t looking. Thus, the strategy’s silence on the AHSS disciplines is not neutral. Silence shapes incentives. When the Tertiary Education Commission operationalises the strategy, it will lean toward what is visible: STEM outputs, commercialisation events, employer-led curriculums, industry-defined competencies and early-career earnings.

AHSS disciplines rarely express their value in these forms. Their impact is cumulative and systemic, encompassing governance capability, cultural literacy, critical thinking, service design, community legitimacy, leadership development, management practice, and policy intelligence. These are essential to innovation, but not easily expressed in the commission’s emerging performance language.

For universities, the risk is clear. Institutions will focus on where they are measured. If AHSS disciplines are not recognised in the strategy’s narrative, the commission’s indicators or the Government’s expectations, they will be progressively squeezed out of the innovation agenda, not because they lack relevance, but because their relevance has not been articulated.

The solution is not to rebalance away from STEM. It is to broaden the strategy’s field of vision to match how innovation actually happens in New Zealand. The country’s comparative strengths lie in design, creativity, storytelling, cultural capability, service innovation, Māori and Pacific enterprise, and human-centred digital technologies. These are AHSS-intensive domains. They need to be recognised as such.

As the strategy moves into implementation, the commission has an opportunity to correct the blind spot. They should explicitly acknowledge how AHSS disciplines contribute to innovation, productivity and commercialisation. Performance measures should incorporate indicators that reflect the creation of intangible value and creative outputs. And, universities should expand their innovation support systems to encompass ventures originating from AHSS fields, and their unique business models, rather than confining them to STEM-based models.

Innovation is cultural, behavioural, managerial and institutional long before it becomes commercial. If the system is to lift New Zealand’s productivity and strengthen its innovation performance, then the disciplines that specialise in understanding people, organisations, culture and society must be part of the national strategy, not invisible within it.