Sir Ian Taylor (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Pāhauwera) founder of Animation Research Ltd (ARL) is receiving an honorary degree for his vision as a business leader in New Zealand.
Taylor is receiving an honorary commerce doctorate from the University of Otago for his contribution to the business, Dunedin and the wider community,
“This doctorate isn’t mine," Taylor says. "It’s the staff, it's everybody around me who’s created this business but I think it also belongs to the university.”
“I’ve never thought of myself as a businessman,” he says of his earlier years in Dunedin with Playschool as a presenter. Eventually, he took over TVNZ's studios in Dunedin with business partner Graham McArthur and created Taylormade productions.
Taylor learned about computer graphics in the late 1980's early 1990s while working in television. while reading an article about a university of Otago coding team winning at the American ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, the first time the competition had been won outside of the US.
'We are storytellers'
He formed a working partnership with the computer sciences department at the University of Otago, with Professor Geoff Wyvill selecting four students to help build the computer graphics business with Taylor.
“If I think about my Māori culture and heritage, I think that’s what we are, we are storytellers. We didn’t have a pencil and paper, our ancestors didn’t write things down, all of our histories were contained in the arts, in waiata, in carvings, in action songs and in storytelling,.” Taylor says.
Vice-Chancellor Professor David Murdoch says Taylor carries "considerable mana and is a true testament to what we hope our tauira go out into the world to achieve.”
During the pandemic Taylor tried to implement an innovative way to test for the coronavirus in a short amount of time.
But he eventually found himself stonewalled by the government not wanting to use his technology for testing and sticking with the PCR testing, which takes up to three days to receive results back.
Taylor and the government have been locking horns ever since, having major disagreements over the government's handling of the pandemic. At one stage a cabinet minister during a zoom meeting with Taylor and government officials told him to stop writing columns for the New Zealand Herald with information he got from such meetings. He said he had been "muzzled".