Tauranga is taking the lead in fostering business innovation by establishing a dedicated ideas hub to encourage experimentation to come up with successful IT applications.

It might be dubbed a shed – a place where tinkering and experimentation are encouraged – but the man behind Tauranga's new Ideas Shed hopes it will become the Bay's ‘silicon valley' hub.

Werner Marx,Idea Shed Chairman, Miles McConway, BOP Regional Council group manager IT and Jane Nees BOP Regional Councillor at the opening this evening.

'Hopefully it will be the founding place for the next Google or Facebook, after-all Mark Zuckerberg had to come from somewhere,” says Werner Marx.

The Ideas Shed was launched in a converted storeroom alongside the iPads and computer gadgets at Werner's Technology Centre in Tauranga's 4th Avenue.

The shed has been set up as an 'ideas and innovation space” that will highlight the opportunities for using information technology for business efficiencies.

'The shed is a place where innovators, students, ICT experts, industry leaders and exporters can take risks, learn what success and failure mean and develop concepts into full-blown commercial ideas,” says Werner.

It is hoped the centre will shift to a larger site once further funding and the right space is found.

This will allow for more networking, seminar, and greater collaboration to generate new thinking or add value to existing ideas.

Werner says under the second stage of the development the centre will be replicated in Rotorua and Whakatane, as a key plank of the Bay of Plenty Regional Council's ICT strategy.

Eventually the Idea Shed will be supported by a business incubation and commercialisation facility to help take the proven ideas to market.

He says the response to the project from the secondary students already involved has been 'fantastic” – with hope a student project to develop a local ‘app' will soon get the go-ahead.

As part of a trial of the project students from Otumoetai and Bethlehem colleges have developed phone apps with the help of Tauranga IT entrepreneur Rory Birkbeck of Techtivity.

Werner says there has been strong interest from other secondary schools to get involved.