Last month’s African Innovation Summit in Cape Verde rewrote the rules for science and innovation meetings on the continent. Future gatherings should strive for the same inclusivity.
The African Innovation Summit in Cape Verde on February 3-6 was truly an inspiring experience.
I have attended many conferences, but nothing like it. It was all-inclusive. There was government, industry, civil society and media as well as representatives from the university sector. And there were real innovators exhibiting their creative innovative products and output from around the world.
But while all these sectors were represented, none dominated. That is to say, it was not a research academic conference, a government policy conference or industry product development conference. It was a conference of synthesis.
The triple helix of government, university and industry was transformed into quadruple helices, by the inclusion of exhibits of innovations and innovators, the participation of civil society and the media. All sectors were represented in the special plenary sessions as well as the parallel sessions, run pragmatically by a mixed leadership.
There were many highlights, but I would like to mention a few. Before the summit, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development agency held a seminar on innovation indicators. The concept of an African Innovation Manual, similar to the Bogota, Oslo and Frascati manuals, was discussed. This would allow evaluations of African innovation to better fit the African context, and avoid taking other manuals and uncritically translating them to the continent.
Another highlight was the presentation of the results of a University of Oxford study on diffusion of innovation in low-income countries [1]. Xiaolan Fu, founding director of the Technology and Management for Development Centre at the University of Oxford, described a pilot project in Ghana, which identifies obstacles to innovation diffusion, the impact of innovations, collaboration between industry and universities, the role of foreign knowledge sources and the importance of policy measures.
The Oxford project was well received, and provides a replicable template for how to combine qualitative and quantitative data to generate insightful contributions to innovation policy. There is a need for more African countries to do similar research, using the Oxford project as a reference and resource.
A third highlight was the special session on challenges and opportunities in university research.
Africa needs to create an African Research Area that reduces the collaborative distance between African researchers. There is also a strong need to create a teaching accreditation scheme that includes nearly all universities in Africa. The scheme will reinforce research to promote teaching, and teaching to strengthen research.
The meeting discussed the need to develop user-orientated research and entrepreneurial science. African universities need to balance basic research with applied basic research and pure applied research. They also need to learn to combine commercialisation, industrial innovation, innovation hubs, science parks, technology spin-offs and technology transfer offices to promote patents and knowledge transfer. Universities in Africa should be incentivised to create wholly or partially owned companies to convert research into innovation. Staff should be encouraged to combine teaching and research with being innovators.
Finally, there was a special session on African and global research network programmes known as Africalics and Globelics respectively. The Globelics Doctoral Academy has trained over 300 PhDs from Africa, Latin America and Asia. The 12th conference of Globelics will take place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 29-31 October. The AIS attendees were all encouraged to join the meeting.
Planning is underway for the African Innovation Summit in 2015. I recommend that the following ideas be included for discussion as concrete ways of promoting African innovation:
- establish a Returning Talent Fund to attract qualified and innovative diaspora and global experts
- appoint industrial managers to provide experience-based learning so that graduates know clearly what industry expects from them
- set up a Pan-African Technology and Management Institute. One of its jobs would be to support AIS in every African country by mobilising resources from the quadruple helices
- create an African Engineering Research, Development and Design Academy as part of the AIS initiative.
I also propose that the next AIS should take place in South Africa. The AIS should be combined with the South African Innovation Summit, which is led primarily by academics, as well as the Open Innovation Summit driven by Nokia. The combined summit should be all-inclusive, and rotate between countries and regions.
The AIS rewrote the way innovation conferences are conducted on the continent, and shows a clear way forward for such meetings. The output from the conference is not going to be books or papers; but the quality and the richness of knowledge circulation.
AIS highlighted the significance of making African economies and society innovation-driven, and inspired with a strong media presence to diffuse the news. I found this first AIS a promising start and ways must be found to promote and sustain it.
Mammo Muchie is a South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChi) professor at the Institute of Economic Research on Innovation (IERI), Tshwane, South Africa. He is also Adjunct Professor at Adama Science and Technology University in Ethiopia and Senior Research Associate at Oxford University, UK.