The Innovation Hub - a community for creators of the future

UNISA becomes a participant in The Innovation Hub's CoachLab™

22 November 2006

The success of The Innovation Hub's unique CoachLab™ Leadership Programme was evident again at the 2006 graduation ceremony held at the Hub's Conference Venue in Pretoria last night, where the class of 2006 received their graduation certificates and demonstrated the innovative solutions to real-time ICT projects that resulted from their year in the CoachLab™.

In addition, Jill Sawers, Manager of the Maxum Business Incubator at The Innovation Hub, who oversees the CoachLab™ activities, announced that UNISA will become a participant in this initiative for next year's intake of postgraduate students.

According to Sawers, UNISA's active participation in 2007 is in line with the Hub's vision growing the CoachLab™ through the involvement of academic institutions of excellence, as well as growing the pool of postgraduates from which to source enhanced skills and develop industry leaders. "We are also looking to attract private sector partners in this expansion drive," she added.

The CoachLab™ fast tracks the development of business skills amongst postgraduate students, giving them exposure to the realities of both start-ups and corporate business and allowing them to experience, first-hand, the entrepreneurial spirit required to succeed in a fast moving business environment.

Awards handed out to the graduates during the event went to Peter Okunzi as the Most Promising Leader, and jointly to Owen Griffin and Patrick Nyelisane for Mentorship Excellence, while MTN's Johanna Joubert and Eric Jacobson were recognised as CoachLab™ Champions.

During their year in the CoachLab™, participants are exposed to a hands-on entrepreneurial learning environment where they work on real-time projects to gain valuable practical experience. The focus is on integrating technical knowledge, leadership and practical skills. Within a year candidates can mature into new economy innovators - able to take initiative, work in a team, apply knowledge and solve problems.

The technologies developed by the 2006 participants include multimedia-messaging services, the measurement of speech transmission quality in GSM/3G networks, a wireless network analysis tool, lightweight high-speed WAP gateway, food store ordering tool, events feedback application, and a wireless/IP access for a human resource database module.

Now in its sixth year of operation, the CoachLab™ is developing world-class human capital for the applied science and technology industry. Run as a partnership between The Innovation Hub, tertiary education and industry, partners respectively provide the infrastructure and entrepreneurial environment, postgraduate candidates and technical expertise, and project work, mentorship, supervision and sponsorship.

The success of this initiative has led to its expansion to include additional partners as co-sponsors and mentors and embrace communications as an additional theme. The 2006 partners and project sponsors were The Innovation Hub, EPI-USE Systems, Cisco Systems, MTN, the University of Pretoria and Tshwane University of Technology. UNISA becomes a participant in 2007.

Managing director of EPI-USE Systems, Danie Behr, confirmed that the class of 2006 showed particular commitment in the transition from the academic to the business world. "They translated academic knowledge into business skills and demonstrated business leadership qualities during the period. It also gave us the opportunity to assist them with informed career decisions".

Brinton Spies at Cisco Systems endorsed this, saying that Cisco will benefit from some of the technologies that the graduates have developed. "We believe that education and innovation are critical ingredients for this country to succeed in the global arena. At the CoachLab™, young innovators create solutions that can be used commercially, adding value to business processes," he added.

And according to MTN's Vish Sanghani, Senior Manager for Human Resources, Learning & Development, one of the most important reasons MTN joined this partnership was the prospect that the CoachLab™ programme would provide the environment for high-calibre students to develop innovation and entrepreneurship at an early stage of their careers. "We believe that this is critical for the development of highly motivated and capable future leaders. It is also an opportunity to contribute to the JIPSA (Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition) initiative, launched by Government in March 2006, " he said.

Since inception in 2001, the CoachLab™ has honed the business skills of 49 postgraduates and prepared them for entry into the business world as active, skilled workers. According to Prof Jan Eloff of the University of Pretoria, their involvement is providing the UP Department of Computer Science with industry collaboration opportunities that expose postgraduate students to the business world and enables them to continue their postgraduate studies on a full time basis. "It is a mutually beneficial situation for industry as well as academia."

Dr Jannie Zaaiman, Dean of the Faculty of Information and Communications at the Tshwane University of Technology concurred. "Participation in the programme has given our students solid insight into the demands of the world of work. We are proud to be associated with the CoachLab™ at The Innovation Hub", he said.

The CoachLab™ is closely associated with the Maxum Business Incubator at The Innovation Hub, where candidates interact with entrepreneurs who are establishing high-tech companies in the Incubator.

The business and education partners involved in the CoachLab™ get the opportunity for a "fresh look" at service and product development while doing due diligence on possible future employees and gaining access to fresh, innovative ideas. Universities benefit from enhanced relationships with industry and from practical exposure to an involvement in industry projects.

According to Arnhem Bezuidenhout, one of the graduants, the mentoring and interacting with influential players in the Hub's physical and virtual networks gave them significant insight into the realities of the business world. "We walk away more confident and better equipped to handle the business environment as young adults with real drive," he said.

Some of the technologies unveiled by the candidates included:

Multimedia messaging services (MMS) used by network operators are bulky and expensive, while most of the functionality is not fully utilised. The aim of the development of this lightweight MMS Centre is to cut the cost o f maintaining, renting or running such a Centre to relay, sort and forward multimedia messages (MTN-SA sponsored).
A current challenge is to provide high-quality, reliable and low-cost voice telephone services over non-dedicated and heterogeneous networks. The project aimed to develop a computerised voice quality measure solution for a mobile communication network (MTN-SA sponsored).
A Event Feedback Application systems was developed that allows thousands of users who have attended an event to rate the event via the Cisco IP phone. Cisco is considering commercialising this development (Cisco sponsored).

Ends

Profiles

The Innovation Hub is the first internationally accredited Science Park in Africa with the objective of establishing a high-tech cluster in Gauteng. The purpose is to enhance the innovative and growth capacity of businesses in the local knowledge economy by providing a strong foundation for the creation of intellectual property and technology commercialisation.

The Innovation Hub serves the market by providing a world-class high-tech business precinct together with cutting edge, state-of-the-art infrastructure and an array of customised value-adding services and business support packages. These have been designed to meet the needs of both knowledge-age entrepreneurs and companies of all sizes involved in R&D, technology commercialisation, and testing and piloting activities.

The Maxum Business Incubator at The Innovation Hub offers an incubation programme that provides an enabling environment where start-ups from the knowledge-intensive sectors - information and communications technology, biosciences, electronics and advanced materials and manufacturing - are fast tracked to compete in the business world. Processes and outputs are benchmarked on a continual basis, against international best practice.

CoachLab™ Leadership Programme, which promotes postgraduate student leadership and business skills development, is now in its fifth year of operation. The pilot CoachLab™, which attracted candidates mainly in the field of Information Technology, has been so successful that the programme has been expanded to include additional partners and embrace communications as an additional theme. The three original partners - The Innovation Hub, EPI-USE Systems and the University of Pretoria - were joined by Cisco Systems, MTN and the Tshwane University of Technology in 2005. UNISA becomes a participant in 2007

The CoachLab™ provides an opportunity for postgraduate candidates to develop their leadership potential and for the sponsoring companies it provides a "fresh look" at service and product development.

Media enquiries
Amie Hunter,
o'Brien Hunter & Associates
Tel: +27 12 342 8380 or email amie@obrienhunter.co.za