Innovation in South Africa - are we doing enough?

Dr Neville Comins, CEO of The Innovation Hub, in the foyer of the Innovation Centre.

This opinion piece by Dr Neville Comins, CEO of The Innovation Hub, was published in the October 2005 issue of Elektron.

Few will disagree that innovation is a key to economic growth. In an increasingly knowledge-driven world economy these concepts - innovation and economic growth - have become inseparable.

Countries and regions are striving to stimulate innovation as a fundamental source of competitiveness, building on locally generated intellectual property linked to their research base.

Europe's Lisbon Strategy has an innovation target of outstripping the United States as the most competitive and dynamic economy in the world by 2009. And a National Innovation Initiative in the US is driving a rapid increase in innovation performance, while similar stimulation activities throughout the developing world - in Korea, India, China, Brazil, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia - are all addressing priorities in this area. Certainly in the technology domain, any country that wants to create and sustain global competitive advantage needs to ensure that these developments can be protected in the market place.

As a country with a relatively small economy on a world scale, South Africans have, over the years, achieved significant global recognition for important contributions to technological innovation. Many of these achievements, however, were made in other countries. South Africa is ranked 39th out of 162 countries in terms of technological achievement. It is clear that we are still largely perceived as an adopter rather than innovator of technology. To retain our global player status, we must do more to augment the imported and implanted technologies. The imperative is to create environments that spur innovation and exploit intellectual property, to feed the technology commercialisation value chain that will ensure revenue generation. In the coming decades, the intellectual property of this country is going to be a fundamental ingredient of competitiveness. Clearly we need to do a great deal more to create and sustain competitive advantage in the international market place.

The South African government is well aware of the need to stimulate entrepreneurship, innovation and growth amongst knowledge-intensive businesses. Science and technology education, innovation and commercialisation are integral components of our National System of Innovation (NSI). The key challenges are adequate funding, skilled human resources, improved private sector R&D, protecting and exploiting intellectual property, and integrating a fragmented government science and technology system. The National R&D Strategy of 2002 highlights the "commercialisation chasm" between our R&D and business sectors and the need to develop improved technology transfer mechanisms. While there have been significant increases in the R&D spend in South Africa - now R10, 1-billion from the public and private sectors - this will need to result in a commensurate level of exploitation to impact on the economy.

A number of agencies have been created to support SMMEs and most of our universities have launched technology transfer and commercialisation offices. However, we have not followed an international trend to create value-adding environments to link these in While this concept is new to South Africa, the Gauteng Provincial Government, through Blue IQ, took a bold step in 2000 when it announced the development of The Innovation Hub as one of its major projects to stimulate economic growth in the province. The local development is built on extensive international learning and benchmarking and as a result, has been awarded full membership of the International Association of Science Parks (IASP), the first in Africa.

The establishment of the Hub has taken cognisance of the key success factors of Science Parks, including the choice of site near universities or research institutions, the need to become part of the larger community of contributing role players, and providing both value-adding services and infrastructure. The trend in the last decade has been the inclusion of incubators on Science Parks to ensure that the critical high-tech start-up company component so relevant to exploitation of new research findings forms part of the development. It is well known that such SMMEs in the USA have contributed disproportionately to the growth of jobs and the economy.

The pilot phase of the Hub's development created one of the first local high-tech incubators, which has nurtured 14 companies over four years, linked business and the University of Pretoria through the CoachLab leadership programme for postgraduate students, and created the INNOV8 network, which has grown to beyond 3 000 members. The pilot activities also brought about a local understanding of the needs of high-tech businesses and contributed to the design of the Hub's main environment, launched in April 2005.

Occupancy of the new facilities has been above expectation with, at the time of writing, 42 companies resident as tenants and Sappi's Technology Centre as the first owner-builder. More buildings are on the drawing board with private sector companies and investors, while relationships with neighboring institutions such as universities and the CSIR are growing steadily. Most of the emerging businesses, however, originate from the private sector and much more work is clearly needed to ensure that the results of research reach the market.

Some of the remaining questions worth asking include:

• Is the IP generated in many research institutions treated as a 'possession' or as a capital asset?
• Do many implemented support and development funding schemes serve the interests of only a few institutions?
• Is the power of a high-tech cluster of universities, businesses and agencies only now starting to be realised in South Africa?
• Is there still too much competition between institutions when we need to harness all the expertise we can muster to compete with international commercial outputs of R&D?
• Do we adequately encourage and reward the innovators in our institutions?

It is nine years since the National System of Innovation became policy. Much has been achieved about which we can all be proud. As the world moves ahead in the knowledge-economy, South Africa must challenge the "commercialisation chasm" as a national priority and in an aligned way. The status quo will not resolve these issues, but emerging new initiatives, such as The Innovation Hub, are ready to play a greater role to see South Africa flourish.

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