Ray's entrepreneurial spirit, fuelled by his ability to think freely and to synthesise, challenges linear approaches to product development and research. Rather, Ray - now CEO of Medicine Mondiale - advocates a process that requires holistic and opportunity-focused thinking from the outset.

What's the career path for a third world / first world entrepreneur?

I think most people arrive at a destination by a series of kind of accidents rather like a pool table ball ricocheting around. I was fortunate enough by accident to get involved in science as a young man. I became a forensic scientist and trained in analytical skills; I was analysing stomach contents, or children's toys for lead content, flammability of teddy bears, that sort of thing.

From there I started up a stream of businesses doing analytical testing for the government, milk testing and waterway testing, fluid effluence and the like. I ran away from England and found myself in New Zealand in 1973. Along with Professor David Paton from Canada. I helped establish the Department of Clinical Pharmacology at Auckland University, and then a separate division from that which was doing drug analysis for multinational drug companies and local generic companies - basically doing drug trials to prove that one drug was equivalent to another.

After about seven years, Douglas Pharmaceuticals invited me to join as a technical director and set up their manufacturing division, manufacturing drugs, because of the work we had been doing with them at the university. We developed about 165 different generic drug presentations which really put New Zealand on the world map in terms of manufacture of locally made generic drugs rather than multinational licensed drugs.

Then I decided to retire, but I met Fred Hollows and he sent me off Eritrea, North Africa, to build an intraocular lens laboratory for making lenses for cataract surgery. I arrived there at the end of the 30-year war of independence, there was nothing there, it was completely derelict. To cut a long story short, we ended up building a lab for the Fred Hollows Foundation and then another one in Nepal. But most importantly, what that did was it introduced me to working in developing countries. We started a company called the Kaizen Group which focused on giving that technology that we knew, how to make drugs, to third world countries so they could make better drugs, better medicines.

And this set you up for the work you're doing now as Medicine Mondiale?

Our business is product realisation. That means more than product development. Product realisation means thinking about the end user and what they want. How are they going to buy the product? How are you going to sell it, and does it tick all of their boxes? You have to start by thinking about how you're going to sell it before you even start making it because you can't make something they can't afford, or something they won't accept for cultural reasons. You have to understand the end user, know your market, do your market research, and then produce products that meet those needs.

I don't really believe in charity. We make products that are affordable and accessible to people in developing countries and that means sometimes changing the paradigm. In this context, a sustainable business has to be one that has a weather eye on the world at large - not just the local environment.

Did you start off with the plan of building the Proteinforte business model as it is now, selling product in the first world to subsidise the developing world?

Training as a scientist means you don't just see a paper clip and the piece of wire, you see the technology behind it. I was looking at the fundamental problem of malnutrition and kids dying in Africa of protein energy malnutrition. They get so sick from diarrhoeal diseases, they get damage to the lining of their stomach from rota viruses, but even if you give them some rice, they may well die trying to digest it. If they are that sick, if you're in a first world hospital, you get an intravenous drip of amino acids which goes straight to the bloodstream and feeds energy into all your cells. We wanted a cheaper version of that, so we investigated developing amino acids that would be easily absorbed in the gut. Generally, amino acids are made by fermented bacteria and separation and I thought there's got to be a better way of breaking down big proteins into smaller proteins.

We discovered that kiwifruit has enzymes that are super digestors of proteins. We found that by literally taking a handful of chicken meat that had been thrown away and mixed that with pulp waste of kiwifruit. It will turn into a milk-like protein drink in about an hour and a half, under certain conditions. It liquefies, you can pour it. We freeze dry the combined material, put it into sachets and transport it around the world. Each freeze-dried sachet contains the protein value of a quarter of a chicken. The finished product is Proteinforte, made from two waste streams combined to create a high-tech product which we can sell at a premium price to people in the first world as an energy soup. And with a small tweak to the same product, we create a quality, high protein, low cost, biogradeable foodstuff for the developing world, something not currently available.

And it's a really cheap technology. We're building a plant in Nepal to produce it. The plant has a chicken farm on one side of the road and a papaya and pineapple farm over the other side. The waste from each farm are our raw materials. Our business is trying to find solutions for developing countries. But one of the first questions that you'll always get asked in developing countries is: can you buy this in your country, do your countrymen use it? Because if they don't, they see that it's another third world bit of rubbish.

And you're able to allay their concerns about quality because Proteinforte has this dual use?

Our technology allows us to make amino acid mixtures that can be isolated very cheaply, much more cheaply than any other previous technology. So that means we can have a basic product like this which is about 30 percent free amino acids, 30 percent peptides. That technology has hidden benefits. Proteinforte has all these free amino acids in it, and you get better protein absorption if you have co-amino acids from the same source. That's the recipe for the T-minus product concept which loads up your system with aminos before you start exercising. T60 is designed to take an hour out before you start because if you start taking carbohydrates half way through exercise, it's already too late; you're already starting to draw on aminos from your muscle tissue. Sports nutritionists are trialling this for the top-end products, and we have [been] working with a couple of companies to develop some energy soups.

We've got where we are today by having a foot in both worlds because we understand the developing world market. It can be a bit like the Wild West, a high risk venture. But it's where, I believe, the real money is going to be in the long term. Companies that will survive will be ones that can engage with that community, particularly China. We have an IV infusion system and a China-based company that wants to license it and get the product into some 14 countries - from India right to the West Coast of America.

One of the restrictions that traditional product development puts on itself it to think in a very linear fashion. I think it much more productive to look at your core technology and see how you can make multiple uses of it in a range of different disciplines. And then if you're clever, what you do is you think about how you can license that technology to different industries for different purposes, and for different markets. That's our model for a sustainable business.