Jul.25 (Xinhua) -- The New Zealand government on Wednesday announced a major initiative to attract world-leading "entrepreneurial researchers" to strengthen the country's universities and broaden its innovation environment.

The government would invest 35 million NZ dollars (24.7 million U.S. dollars) over four years to entice researchers and their labs to base themselves in New Zealand, Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment Minister Steven Joyce said in a statement.

"We are especially wanting to recruit people with an established record in innovation and entrepreneurship in the top 'maker' disciplines, to help grow the pipeline of excellent innovative start-up companies in New Zealand, and train the next generation of scientific entrepreneurs," said Joyce.

The Entrepreneurial Universities program will see the government entering into a 50-50 partnership with individual universities to attract and support named researchers and their teams to work in the university for an initial period of three to five years.

"We will invite all the universities to bid for the opportunity, and expect up to 15 to 20 world-leading researchers and their teams to be brought to New Zealand over a three-year period."

The program would be modelled on other similar programs around the world including those in the United States and the United Kingdom.

New Zealand's universities already had a very good reputation for excellence with all eight universities ranked in the top 3 percent in the world, he said.

"However, it's a very competitive world out there. We need to keep challenging ourselves and keep adding to our high-tech sector," said Joyce.

Experts and scientists welcomed the move, saying it would bring valuable intellectual property and research capacity.

"I think there are particular opportunities across health and medical technologies, 'big data' technologies and analytics, in areas core to the New Zealand economy such as agritech, wine and the wider horticulture domain, and tourism," Professor John Raine, pro vice chancellor research and innovation at Auckland's AUT University, said in a statement.