Celebrating innovation

THE inaugural PNG Innovation Conference in Port Moresby today aims to celebrate the country’s innovation, according to co-host Business Advantage International Ltd.
Publishing director Andrew Wilkins said the event would attract small, large, local and international businesses.
He said the country had its fair share of problems and challenges that only Papua New Guineans had solutions to. They were already doing it in their own space.
“The best way to solving PNG’s problems is through PNG solutions,” he said.
While providing a preview of the conference, Wilkins attributed this to Jaive Smart, a small business that addressed the challenge of purchasing Easypay for PNG Power Ltd.
“It’s a really simple idea, but it took somebody to think of it,” Wilkins said.
He said Air Niugini managing director Alan Milne would be presenting the company’s higher altitude programme.
He said it was not an invention but it is an idea that someone had come up with to change something that used to be.
Keynote presentations will come from Deloitte Centre for the Edge’s innovation expert Pete Williams and Hewlett Packards’ Megatrends ambassador Paul Burman
Wilkins said inaugural awards would also be announced tomorrow during the first part of the conference and the awardees, one from the small businesses and the other from big businesses, would also have a chance to speak after the presentation.
There would be a panel discussion where National Information Communications Technology Authority (Nicta), PNG Dataco and Digicel would discuss on how the Coral Sea Cable Submarine project and the Kumul submarine cable projects would address the internet challenges the country faces.
Wilkins said there would be a session on digital banking on what the major commercial financial institutions were doing to make it easy for people to access banking services.