In the "knowledge economy" idea-making is a creative venture. And so too was the Britten Motorcycle Company. In the 1990s Britten machines came out of nowhere to successfully take on the factory giants of the United States, Japan and Europe in international motorcycle racing. Hailed for their outlandishly innovative design and engineering as well as their successful performance on the racing circuits, the bikes still command respect - one of the ten Britten V1000 bikes is on permanent display at Te Papa. Company founder John Britten died in 1995 but his innovative design ethos lives on. One of his friends, Wayne Alexander, was employed by the company to generate revenue while the search continued for a joint venture partner.
Under Wayne Alexander's management the company continued to service Britten Superbikes for owners around the world, but its focus shifted to rapid prototyping, and its main product became ideas. Ultimately, Mr Alexander and the prototyping business peeled off from BMC, to continue operating, first as a subsidiary of Britten Prototypes and then independently, as Dashfoot Limited.
The company is searching for what American writer Michael Lewis terms The New New Thing. In his book of the same name, Lewis defines the new new thing as a technology, or an idea, on the cusp of commercial viability.
"It is not even necessarily a new idea – most everything has been considered by someone, at some point. The new new thing is a notion that is poised to be taken seriously in the marketplace. It's the idea that is a tiny push away from general acceptance and, when it gets that push, will change the world." The telephone, the television, the Sony Walkman – each in its time was a new new thing. And Mr Alexander hopes that at least one of the ideas that Dashfoot generates will prove to be another.
The process is entrepreneurial, blending a passion for creativity, a tolerance of risk, a sense of opportunity and timing, and a good measure of business nous. Mr Alexander heads the hunt. He fits the Silicon Valley model of the modern entrepreneur, casually dressed and intense. A friend of John Britten from the early days, he served two years on the Britten Race Team and supervised and assisted with the building of the last two Britten VIOOOs produced.
At first glance, prosthetics seems an unlikely place to direct expertise acquired in the pursuit of speed, but it is a huge and well-developed market. Worldwide the production of artificial limbs and orthotics (braces) is a $4 billion industry. There are more than 1.4 million amputees in the US alone. It is a growing market: about 100,000 people undergo lower-limb amputations every year in the US; and landmines boost the annual total of such amputations in many other countries. Each day about 70 people - one every 15 minutes - step on some of the estimated 110 million antipersonnel mines scattered around the world. Only half of them die.
The timing seemed right in 1997, when Mr Alexander began to think about prosthetics; the artificial limb industry had long been under the control of the New Zealand Artificial Limb Board (or one of its previous incarnations), but it seemed that market reform would see prosthetic services opened up to outside providers - though this didn't in fact happen.