The pair have signed a historic deal to supply the know-how for China to pick out the hi-tech companies in an ambitious plan to roll out 1000 business incubator parks by 2005.

Each of the parks will hothouse the businesses that China hopes will become the new Microsoft's, Compaq's and Orisons and unseat the US as the world's largest economy.

But to get the chance of a government hand-up, each fledgling company must get past the business assessment tools designed in the Auckland suburb of Albany to identify which are most likely to succeed or fail.

And it's not just China that is pinning its hopes of future development on the know-how of Steve Lewin and Margaret Mulqueen of QLBS.com.

Iran - like China, a highly educated and tech literate society - is already using Lewin's Q100 system to choose companies for its Isfahan Science and Technology town, a 600ha business incubator being built in the desert 370km from Tehran.

The park at Isfahan, a city known locally as "Half of the World" because of its classic architecture of flowered domes and giant minarets, is just the first of 17 science and technology towns planned, all of which will use Q100 to sift the entrepreneurial wheat from the chaff.

Lewin, for 17 years a management consultant, said the scale of the deal showed how finding a global niche - in this case business assessment software for incubators - let New Zealand business foot it on a world stage. "The business incubator and science park community is very small globally, but it's a very powerful niche for us. That's why the Iran deal was so important for us because they are a member of the International Association of Science Parks."

The association's members share information providing a small community in which to market.

Lewin's software is essentially a scoring system designed to rate a company's chances of survival on a scale of one to 10. It is based on years of work to identify the most common factors in businesses that fail or succeed.

Initially the software was picked up by Victoria University, New Zealand Trade & Enterprise and Te Puni Kokiri, but countries all over the world are embracing incubators, a concept pioneered in the US and Germany 20 years ago.

There was a simple reason why, Lewin said. An un-incubated hi-tech company stands an 80% chance of going belly-up. In an incubator, which provides advanced services like computer networking and mentoring which are scare resources in many countries, that rises to an 80% chance of survival over two to five years.

Lewin's system is designed to help trained locals (in Iran training has been provided via the internet) identify weaknesses in a company's make-up that could undermine it. It's therefore not just a tool to spot probable losers, but to help guide and nurture companies by identifying their weaknesses and allowing remedies to be dealt with.

"Most small businesses that fail do so for some very simple reasons: problems with cashflow that are predictable, people management and marketing," Lewin said.

Pinpointing such reasons for failure among New Zealand companies allowed Lewin to build his system.

Discussions with India are advancing, and development agencies in the struggling north of England have shown interest as well.