Kiwi teenagers 'business savvy'

HALL OF FAMER: Tony Falkenstein, of Aquacool, wants young people to learn more about business.

Relevant offers

New Zealand teenagers are world beaters when it comes to business brains and innovation, according to leading entrepreneur Tony Falkenstein.

Even those from the poorest families and lowest decile schools can foot it internationally if given the opportunity, he says.

Falkenstein is being recognised for his entrepreneurial skills by being one of the 2008 laureates to be inducted into the Fairfax Media Business Hall of Fame.

The Business Hall of Fame was launched in 1994 by the Enterprise New Zealand Trust and this year will see the 100th laureate join the Hall of Fame, with eight new members announced. Four are living businessmen, four are being honoured posthumously.

Falkenstein has been a CEO of companies for over 25 years, including subsidiaries of multinationals, two NZX-listed companies, and for the past 16 years his own family company, Red Eagle Corp.

Falkenstein said New Zealand has a huge potential resource in entrepreneurial skill amongst our young people, but we are not mining it because we do not take enough effort to teach financial literacy and business skills.

Young people who have the raw potential to go on and be business entrepreneurs never consider it because they have not been brought up in a household where people talk business, he said.

"And it would just never come to their minds that they could be in business."

New Zealand is therefore hobbled in business we have business people coming from only a small sector of society.

"It's like picking the All Black team only from Invercargill."

Yet we had the talent pool to be global leaders in entrepreneurial skills.

"I think it's like developing a product. This is a niche that I think New Zealand could say, `Hey, we want to lead this.'

"If you said 0.1 per cent of New Zealanders have an enormous talent for entrepreneurship, then we're missing out on a lot of them.

"My passion is if we can teach business skills early, that's the path to economic prosperity. In New Zealand young people just don't have financial skills. Financial literacy has been dumbed down and teachers see business as a necessary evil."

He was an average student at Auckland's Onehunga High School. He passed School Certificate but failed University Entrance once.

More than 40 years later Falkenstein, the son of poor German-Jewish refugees who had fled the Nazis, is the hero of his old school.

Falkenstein was barely known to the public until 2003 when Red Eagle underwrote $300,000 to establish Onehunga High as the country's first business secondary school.

In 2004, Falkenstein gave the Onehunga business school a further hand-up with a donation of $1 million worth of Just Water shares.

He also gave similar donations to the University of Auckland business school and the Unitec school of business management.

- © Fairfax NZ News