Freedom 250: Bringing Māori innovation to the world

Selected by the US Embassy as Aotearoa New Zealand’s sole representative in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship cohort of the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), Tui Kaumoana joined 180 emerging leaders from around the world for the three-week programme.

Tui, Kaiārahi of the University’s Faculty of Science, took part in discussions about how innovation can better serve communities, while building relationships with leaders from across the globe.

The 2026 programme was part of Freedom 250, a series of national and international initiatives marking the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence.

As part of the anniversary celebrations, the US Department of State expanded the IVLP into eight themed cohorts exploring topics including artificial intelligence, science and technology, innovation and entrepreneurship, cultural heritage, agriculture, youth in politics and local government.

For Tui, of Waikato and Ngāti Maniapoto whakapapa, the experience was an opportunity to share a distinctly Māori perspective on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Her own journey bridges business, academia and kaupapa Māori. Before joining Waipapa Taumata Rau, Tui spent more than a decade living in Asia, building businesses across textiles, merchandising, hospitality and manufacturing. Returning home, she helped grow her family’s Auckland Night Markets before completing an MBA and embarking on doctoral research at the University of Auckland.

Today, she brings that experience into her work supporting conversations around Māori intellectual property and how research institutions can better recognise, protect and support Māori knowledge and innovation.

“As a Kaiārahi of the Faculty of Science and doctoral candidate, one of my ongoing questions is how knowledge created in institutions actually reaches and benefits the communities those institutions are supposed to serve,” Tui says.

“I am hoping to see examples here of that gap being closed, of entrepreneurs and communities and institutions working in genuine partnership rather than just in parallel.”  

Early in the programme, Tui was invited to represent her cohort of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in a recorded interview, opening with an acknowledgement of the Nacotchtank and Piscataway peoples, the traditional custodians of the Washington, D.C. area.

When asked what she was most looking forward to, she spoke about meeting people creating solutions for their own communities.

“I am most excited to meet entrepreneurs and community leaders who are solving real problems from the ground up – people who have decided not to wait for permission but to build what their communities need. That energy is something I recognise and love.”

For Tui, the programme’s theme of freedom spoke directly to being a wāhine Māori and wearer of moko kauae, and she carried her whakapapa with her throughout the experience.

“Freedom, for me, is the ability to be fully yourself, and to bring your whole whakapapa, your lineage, your language, your values, into every room you walk into.

“I carry moko kauae, the traditional facial tattoo of a Māori woman. It is my whakapapa written on my face. In every meeting, every boardroom, every conversation on this programme, I am here as myself, not despite where I come from but because of it. That, to me, is what freedom feels like. It is not the absence of challenge. It is the freedom to show up whole.”

Tui says it was the relationships built beyond the formal programme that left the greatest impression.

“What gives me the most hope are the conversations that happen outside – over shared meals, on the way to the next meeting, in the moments when someone says, ‘We have exactly that same challenge at home’.’

“Indigenous peoples, in particular, have always known how to build relationships across great distances. Our ancestors navigated vast oceans to find one another. I felt that same spirit in gatherings like this.”