Get off the Grass: Kickstarting New Zealand’s Innovation Economy

New Zealanders work harder and earn less than most other people in the developed world. Get Off the Grass is about how we can change that. In a brilliant intellectual adventure that takes us from David Ricardo and Adam Smith to economic geography and the science of complex networks, Shaun Hendy and Paul Callaghan tell us to ‘get off the grass!’ and start exporting knowledge rather than nature. The key to increasing New Zealand’s prosperity, they argue, is innovation in high-tech niches. If we are going catch up with the countries that lure our young people away, we will need to learn to innovate like a city of four million people; we will need to start taking science seriously; we will need to start seeing ourselves as people of learning, not just of the land - and we will need to put our money where our mouths are.