New Zealand Digital Twin Leaders step up

By Adam Beck | Executive Director, Smart Cities Council Australia New Zealand | Lead, Australia New Zealand Digital Twin Hub

The inaugural New Zealand Digital Twin Summit was hosted in Wellington on Thursday 8th July 2021. Close to 100 policy makers, practitioners and academics gathered for a day of intensive dialogue and deep-dives to set direction on building a thriving marketplace for this powerful data activation capability.

We undertook a debrief interview with Aurecon's Digital Practice Lead for New Zealand, Keri Niven and SCCANZ's Jannat Maqbool, Director of New Zealand. In the video below we walk through the program and share key highlights from the day.

This debrief is also available in an audio format on our podcast - The Smart Cities Chronicles. Just head to your favourite podcast platform (Apple, Spotify, Google) and search 'Smart Cities Chronicles'.

The Summit was also an opportunity for some of our Digital Twin Challenge cohort members to share their views on the nation's journey to building greater Digital Twin capability.

Here's what some of the cohort members had to say about the day:

"My observations of the day were that although for many of us we are just starting out on our journey, there is some real momentum, passion and focused effort on driving us towards the development of our digital twin future, said Theresa Wells, Market Leader Digital APAC at GHD.

My sentiment is that although a focus on development of policy, guidelines and the setting of a strategic direction from government is the right one, we also cannot wait for that to be developed, and it is important that organisations and industry continues to innovate and move forward in harmony to help understand exactly what the benefits will be and why the investment is worth it.

One of our deep-dive co-leads Tania Walsh (Business Director, Beca) remarked "as a first time attendee, I really enjoyed the opportunity to network with other like minded individuals with a similar passion for Digital Twins".

More importantly, it was great to see how we can solve a range of problems using a Digital Twins framework. The opportunity to share stories of the trials, tribulations and successes was invaluable. I really liked hearing from the speakers with actual Digital Twin activity underway. That tied nicely into the challenges, policy, data and enablement. People naturally come together with various views all of which knit together the fabric of future Digital Twins".

More information about the 2021 New Zealand Digital Twin Summit is available here.