Canterbury Tech Summit 2022

Melissa is best known as a foresight practitioner and professional director, with over 25 years’ experience as an entrepreneur and strategist.

She has been founder and CEO of a number of technology companies, along the way earning 3 Fast50s and several AsiaPacific Fast 500s.  She has an eclectic academic background, including Anthropology, Epidemiology and Waste Management. She started working on Big Data Algorithms in the late 1980s, and took her first coding course in 1979 – so has an opinion about new technology and how slow it can be to become mainstream.

Melissa has attended the Te Hono Bootcamp at Stanford University twice, trained as a foresight practitioner with The Institute For The Future in Palo Alto and studied with Clayton Christiansen in his approach to disruptive innovation through Harvard Business School. In 2015 she was named Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in recognition for her services to technology.  She is deeply curious and especially interested in emerging business models.

She is named for a mythological bee creature so tweets as @HoneyBeeGeek.

“One of New Zealand’s most successful tech stories”

As Seequent’s former Chief Executive, Shaun is proud to be part of a Canterbury tech company success story. Shaun managed the strategy, risk and return to grow Seequent from a small start-up business in 2010 to an award-winning, global brand. Seequent has become an internationally recognised market leader in Geoscience Earth Modelling software across the Mining, Civil, Construction, Environmental and Energy sectors. 

In June 2021, Seequent officially joined Bentley Systems creating a unique opportunity to explore new capabilities in surface and subsurface software innovation and to help companies all over the world solve complex problems in more responsible and sustainable ways.