Some thoughts on innovation hubs

12 Feb, 2021 - 00:02 0 Views
Some thoughts on innovation hubs

eBusiness Weekly

Alfred M. Mthimkhulu

This week, the United Arab Emirates’ spacecraft reached Mars after seven months in space. The mission was initiated in 2013 and its success makes the UAE the fifth country to reach Mars, the first Arab country. The mission will study climate on Mars assessing its role in atmospheric loss.

Its success is much more than triumph of Science as 33-year-old Sarah Al-Amiri, Chair of the UAE Space Agency and Minister for Advanced Technology eloquently put it across to a beaming CNN News anchor: “Today marks our celebration for a golden jubilee; 50 years of coming from a country with relatively no infrastructure that now has an orbit around Mars. It is a stipulation for our next 50 years, one that has a solid bedrock on Science, Technology, Innovation and Creativity”. Who could have seen that coming in, say, 1991 — that a union of chieftainships in a desert would three decades later be a beacon of ultra-modern science be it architecture, medicine, engineering or even the Arts!

As I followed space updates from the UAE, I was engrossed in Dr McLean Sibanda’s recently published book “Nuts and Bolts: strengthening Africa’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Ecosystem”. In it, he reflects on his work as CEO of the first internationally recognised Science and Technology Park in sub-Saharan Africa, The Innovation Hub in Gauteng Province, South Africa.

He discusses with micro detail how his team and network implemented macro-level policies such as the province’s Innovation and Knowledge Economy Strategy and the National Development Plan Vision 2030. But the book is not a monologue because he lets others share their views on the work they did in their own words – other being fellow employees, executives in public and private sector, entrepreneurs, researchers, financiers and so on.

The updates from the UAE indeed heightened my interest in the book given its emphasis on research-driven industrialisation. What also heightened my interest was Zimbabwean government’s current drive in setting up Innovation Hubs. The Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development set a goal a couple of years ago of an Innovation Hub per state university and an Industrial Park per province. The Ministry contends that Hubs and Parks will ensure that knowledge generated by universities has ready platforms for take-up, implementation and scaling such that jobs are created and livelihoods improved. In October last year at the launch of the Great Zimbabwe University Industrial Park, President Mnangagwa said “construction of Innovation Hubs and Industrial Parks are not the ultimate end”.

The main interest of my Government is in the products and services that must be churned out of these facilities impacting every sector of our economy.”

Can the Hubs and Parks deliver? Fundamentally, these Hubs and Parks are not a new theme for driving industrialisation and modernisation in Zimbabwe. As a matter of fact, NUST was established for that very reason and new universities thereafter have kept that emphasis.

NUST structured all its degrees as ‘applied science’ than them being purely abstract and set-up what was then called a Technology Park or Technopark. There were similar parks in other institutions. The Scientific and Industrial Research and Development Centre was also set up in 1993 under the provisions of the Research Act (1986) “to carry out strategic research and development for the benefit of the manufacturing, service, agriculture and mining sectors in Zimbabwe as well as to commercialise R & D outputs”.

A then revolutionary add-on to NUST’s applied science degrees was a full-year of industrial attachment to ensure candidates, the university and industry was abreast with both quality and depth of skills in the country as well as technological gaps that needed attention. Industrial attachment is now standard in local universities though it has become difficult for students to find suitable places and eventual jobs.

But all this is perhaps the teaching and training side of universities than the research function which Innovation Hubs underscore. Innovation Hubs facilitate commercialisation of intellectual capital to improve society’s wellbeing. Intellectual capital is essentially research output such as, for simplicity sake, the medicinal content of Zumbani/Umsuzwana captured with almost absolute exactness and packaged in units that will deliver optimal results.

Will Innovation Hubs work in Zimbabwe? Science is borderless. The more scientists work together wherever domiciled, the higher the likelihood that questions of mutual interests will be addressed efficiently and effectively. As more areas of mutual interests are explored, local expertise deepens such that unique local questions can then be tackled with higher chances of success and impact. There were at least 450 scientists on the UAE’s Mars space project and only 200 of them were Emirates yet it is the Emirates flag that flew high this week.

Interestingly, the history of Science as a method of enquiry and tool for human progress shows that the Arab world was for centuries ahead of the west but stalled because of, some suggest, a religion that made society insular. The more insular in outlook Zimbabwe is in her quests, the more certain than most endeavours for progress will fail. The country, especially its research institutes must be plugged into global networks since modern manufacturing processes are also interlinked across countries as opposed to yesteryear self-contained factories.

The importance of being part of a conducive network runs through ‘Nuts and Bolts’. The author calls such a network the ‘Entrepreneurship Ecosystem’. In partly implementing the Gauteng Innovation and Knowledge Economy Strategy for instance, his team launched a series of competitions one of which was on bioscience technologies (agro-processing, pharma and cosmeceuticals). A public call for proposal on the competitions was made. Submissions “were screened to identify top innovations with potential for proof of concept, piloting and scalability”. Partners in the ecosystem trained entrepreneurs, helped test their concepts and coached them on raising capital. The Hub itself was a network for peer entrepreneurs. It also provided appropriate infrastructure and helped in lining-up post-Hub scale-up funds. The partners in the bioscience ecosystem included local universities and research centres such as SA Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, the parent Ministry, Emory University in the US (including the Goizueta Business School) and Pfizer – all contributing unique and world class expertise to start-ups, including some seed capital.

The question African countries like Zimbabwe face as they launch Innovation Hubs is the extent to which local research centres are inclined to (and able to) tap into global expertise. If such an inclination and capacity to act on it exists, then it is likely that some 33-year-old may, a few decades down the road, broadcast a national achievement to a beaming global audience.

Innovation Hubs and Industrial Parks buildings are a small piece of the puzzle. What matter most is the extent to which these conduits of industrialisation and modernisation – the Innovation Hubs, the Industrial Parks and the Research Centres anchoring them – are part of an enabling entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Email: [email protected]; Twitter: @mthimz

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