The Productivity and Innovation of Māori Frontier Firms

Abstract

Te Au Rangahau (Massey Business School’s Māori business research centre) was invited by the New Zealand Productivity Commission (the Commission) to provide a review of the Commission’s report on its frontier firms inquiry, with a focus on the Māori frontier firms. The inquiry adopts the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) definition of frontier firms – those within the top 10% of firms’ productivity distribution in an industry. This definition brings around 30,000 firms into scope for this inquiry. Identifying Māori firms within this cohort becomes functionally complex. Some of the approaches of identifying Māori firms include business owners’ ethnicity, employees’ ethnicity, the nature of the product and service, or commercial and social enterprises operating with Māori values, philosophy, and tikanga (Statistics New Zealand, 2016). The Commission recognises that there is no single agreed definition of a Māori business or Māori firm as the Māori economy comprises a range of organisational forms and structures under various legal frameworks.