Rod McNaughton wins Critic and Conscience Award

Professor Rod McNaughton’s sustained public contributions to national debates on innovation, entrepreneurship, and tertiary education has earned him a 2026 Critic and Conscience of Society Award.

Sponsored by philanthropic trust The Gama Foundation and administered by Universities New Zealand – Te Pōkai Tara, the annual award recognises his impact as an outstanding critic and conscience of society.

McNaughton, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Academic Director for the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Auckland, says New Zealand’s long-standing productivity challenge is not primarily a failure of ideas, but a failure of institutional design.

Over the past few years, and in particular as the Government has been actively restructuring the science, innovation and technology system, he’s been working to raise awareness of the need to reframe entrepreneurship and research commercialisation as a national capability system.

A key feature of McNaughton's commentary has been to reframe entrepreneurship and commercialisation as system-level issues. He positioned entrepreneurship education as "civic infrastructure" and argued it should be embedded across the education pipeline. He also described intellectual property reform as an "experiment in trusting inventors," highlighting the need for aligned incentives and institutional capability.

“New Zealand’s innovation future won’t be secured through isolated policy levers,” says McNaughton. “It depends on coherent institutional capability-building across the full pipeline, from school classrooms to university laboratories and commercialisation governance.

“For decades, we have produced high-quality research and celebrated innovation, yet struggled to convert knowledge, talent and discovery into enduring, high-value enterprises at a national scale.

“This is not a marginal policy concern. It’s a structural constraint on productivity, economic resilience and the opportunities available to future generations.”

McNaughton’s public scholarship in the entrepreneurship space has been impactful and wide-reaching. In 2025, he published nine analytical articles in The Conversation, garnering 177,327 verified reads. He was also quoted or mentioned in the media 89 times across several areas, including entrepreneurial education, reaching a potential audience of 2.6 million.

His research has been cited in 22 policy documents across four countries, including by UNESCO, the OECD and the European Union. And as the academic director of the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, he also supports programmes that expose students and researchers to commercial thinking, mentorship, and applied pathways.

Established in 2017, the Critic and Conscience of Society Award encourages academics to provide expert commentary on issues affecting the New Zealand community and future generations.