New Zealand Engineering 1999 September

Dennis Chapman

Image is nothing - essense is everything

Dennis Chapman is not a man for convention.

The millionaire founder of stunningly successful Christchurch company Swichtec greets visitors to his Addington office in shorts and jandals. It’s winter but Dennis doesn’t care. He likes to dress this way. Informal, earthy, unpretentious and most comfortable when roughing it.

He is outspoken about his profession and matters relating to it. Matters like education. And he expresses himself with raw-boned candour. People listen when Dennis Chapman talks because he backs his words with his wallet and what he says makes sense.

He set up and funded Electrenz, an organisation dedicated to raising awareness of electrotechnology by promoting educational and career opportunities.

He is the founder of the New Zealand Intellectual Capital Foundation, a body which promotes knowledge - or intellectual capital - as the New Zealand economy’s primary raw material.

Dennis pursues the ideal with a passion. More and more of his time is being spent these days trying to steer New Zealand out of what he calls industrial age thinking, into the information age.

The vehicle by which he believes this may be achieved is education and, to this end, he has selected two Christchurch schools - St Martin’s Primary School and Riccarton High School - as showcases for technology-based learning systems into which he is pouring a small fortune.

He bluntly identifies some compelling reasons why he is leading an educational crusade.

"New Zealand is in an absolute dung heap at the moment with a government which has offered no leadership for the last 20 years. We’ve gone from No. 3 in the OECD standings to lower than 20 and we’re going downhill real fast," Dennis declares.

"The Government has spent all its research and development money on the sheep’s back and on commodity trading, trying to make better commodities so we can get better markets. We make bloody good sheep meat - better than just about anybody in the world - but can we sell it to America? Hell, no! They put big tariffs up. So all that research and development money is being wasted."

He takes a thunderous serve at education, too.

"Our whole secondary school system is an absolute dog. It just squashes innovation in a big way," he says. "Education in general is getting it wrong. At the moment, the curriculum is the information people have to remember and the way we assess it is by measuring people’s ability to regurgitate that stored information.

"That doesn’t mean the people who are being tested have any essential skills. Teachers don’t teach those skills. They teach the curriculum and hope that by doing so people will get the skills they need.

"What they should be doing is teaching the skills and using the curriculum as the context into which they should be put."

When a student left primary school, he or she should have learnt all the skills to be a self-motivated learner. In secondary school, he or she should be learning the subjects that interested them the most.

"Most people don’t find out what their deep-down desires are until they have finished university studies and then discover they hate what they’ve spent the last 10 years training to be," Dennis says. "By then it’s too late to re-train and they are locked out. They have a miserable existence for the rest of their lives doing something they absolutely hate."

Dennis has only to re-visit his own education for an example of its inadequacies.

He was making model boats with electric motors and lights when he was 10 years old and soon moved on to crystal radio sets. By the time he was 17, he had built an amplifier, oscilloscope and a random number selector which won him first prize at the inaugural Secondary Schools Science Fair.

"In most areas, I had a good experience at school but mainly because I am a contextual learner. I learn best if things are put in context and I need a global understanding of what I’m doing so I can put the information into it." he says.

"I did so well in the school system because I was getting all the global and contextual experience I needed at home. I was always pulling apart motorbikes and putting them together, and playing with electronics. Most kids today don’t get that and therefore a good percentage end up failing because the system just caters for people who can remember things.

"The truth is, most of the kids who fail do so because the system fails them. We’re trying to fix that."

Dennis left school because he realised it could not help him develop the skills he perceived he needed. He joined Tait Electronics as an apprentice and quickly impressed with his flair for design. He completed his NZCE and Bachelor of Engineering before becoming chief engineer in charge of radio design.

When the company pressed him to accept a management position at the expense of his design role, Dennis severed his 13-year connection with Tait Electronics and launched an independent design consultancy business, D. Chapman Electronics, developing products the rights to which he sold in exchange for royalties.

He began experimenting with switchmode power supplies after reading an article about research being carried out in this field by Hewlett Packard.

"Switchmode technology allows lower frequency mains power to be chopped up at a rate of 200,000 cycles per second and then converted to the lower DC voltage needed for telecommunications power," Dennis explains. "Because power can be broken down much faster, the size of transformers needed is correspondingly much smaller to do the same job and overall efficiency is higher than with older technology."

He cashed in his superannuation, mortgaged the family house, and pooled his and his wife’s savings to provide the capital to make his ideas a reality.

His first commercial power supply left the telecommunications industry agog. It was half the size and weight of his competitors’ product and performed as well if not better.

Telecom New Zealand was the first company to invest in Dennis’s high efficiency transformer. Other major customers followed in short order.

To manufacture these power supply systems, several of Dennis’s former colleagues at Taits joined him in 1985 in a new company, Eltec, formed after Dennis and two others bought out Consumer Electronics, one of his biggest early consultancy clients.

Eltec became Swichtec in 1994 and has quickly become one of New Zealand’s brightest high technology companies, whose sales will top $80m this year. It has manufacturing plants in Malaysia and China and an office in England.

Dennis has moved from technical director at Swichtec, and one of its major shareholders, to the position of technical consultant. Increasingly, he finds himself immersed in education and the role technology can play to enhance it.

He has donated 100 computers to St Martin’s Primary School and put up money to hire teachers who can develop a learning programme using technology as a tool.

With Dennis’s financial support, Riccarton High School is also breaking new ground in the integration of education and technology. He estimates he has contributed between $3m and $4m to programmes for Electrenz, St Martin’s Primary School and Riccarton High School.

"If we don’t do this, New Zealand is dead in the water. The Government is providing no leadership so there’s a group of us trying to be a catalyst for change," he says.

A stake recently bought in a Christchurch television station, Canterbury Television, may give Dennis another educational implement as he seeks to re-tool modern learning. His financial commitment gives Dennis daily air time from 9am to 2.30pm and, in all likelihood, it will be used for an educational application.

"I have a vision that could make New Zealand the Silicon Valley of the world’s education structures," he says.

Equally, if his message goes unheeded, the country could slide into Third-World despair. In shorts and jandals and with technology as his lance, Dennis Chapman is leading a crusade in the name of enlightenment.

Brian Cowley is a freelance journalist from Christchurch based in Seattle