Goal 16: Peace, Justice and Strong institutions

Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.

Get Good Done

Get Good Done is a social innovation programme run by the Business School’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Themed around the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, it tasks participants to come up with solutions to some of the biggest environmental, social, and cultural issues of our time. The programme attracted participants from a kaleidoscope of cultures, interests, experiences and knowledge. Participants start as individuals and form teams based on a problem they are attracted to. Over the course of the weekend, they dive deep into the problem and scope a solution.

Solutions presented included air-cleaning products, gamification apps to encourage people to use sustainable and healthier modes of transport, an online platform to help those with social anxiety and a support system for local farmers to reduce carbon produced through food freight and packaging.

Over the course of the weekend, participants got to experience rapid ideation workshops where they used the power of design thinking to help question the problem, the assumptions, identify unknown problems and reframe them in human-centric ways. The programme team are grateful for the support of 19 collaborators from the international innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem who provided support to participants through mentorship. The staggering quality and thoughtful design of the programme was reflected back in the overwhelmingly positive feedback received.  Get Good Done had a Net Promoter Score of 89. The 2018 New Zealand benchmark NPS for the tertiary education sector is 20. Read more

Luxor Astronautics – Re-inventing the satellite industry

Recent events have rekindled public attention regarding the question of militarisation and the weaponisation of outer space. Satellites are becoming an increasingly important tool in international surveillance and verification. The growth of the small satellite industry is limited by the power available from solar arrays. In the small satellite market, power systems, which are primarily solar arrays, typically consume about 30% of the spacecraft’s mass of a high-performance mission. Satellite designers and integrators make compromises by restricting the number of available instruments or decreasing their performance in favour of lower power consumption.

Satellites could achieve their true potential if the power budget were not a factor. Luxor Astronautics is a venture born out of the University of Auckland Business School’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. They are developing a product that utilises a passive deployment process to deploy a large structure of thin-film photovoltaics into a compact pre-deployed volume at launch, all while remaining lightweight, compact and easy to integrate. Read more

GovHack – Open data hackathon

GovHack is the largest open data hackathon in the southern hemisphere. It aims to bring together people of all abilities who seek to make life better through open data. The 2020 Auckland chapter of GovHack was facilitated by the University of Auckland’s Unleash Space, bringing together students, staff and the wider community. Government Data was utilised to ‘hack’ and prototype solutions to community problems. Read more.