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Inorms 2023: Funder official says partnerships can tackle crises and reduce waste
South African universities should partner more with industry, an official from the country’s largest funder of fundamental science has said.
Such ties could address crises the country is facing, including rolling blackouts from energy shortages, and reduce funding duplication, according to Koena Motloi (pictured left), the National Research Foundation of South Africa’s director for industry and strategic engagement.
“We need to go beyond academic impact and ensure that what comes out of our connected programmes gets adopted and commercialised by industry through partnerships,” he said on 1 June.
One approach to such partnerships is the creation of spin-off companies through university technology-transfer offices. “Those [spin-offs] that contribute to job creation, those are things that we need to look into,” Motloi said. “When those things are done, we can seriously say that we’ve achieved impact.”
Motloi made his remarks during a session of the annual conference of the International Network of Research Management Societies in Durban, South Africa, where he focused on getting industry funding to the social sciences.
Tackling crises and reducing waste
For years, governments around the world have pushed for research to address national priorities, sometimes meeting resistance from academics. Motloi advocated such a “culture shift”, whereby knowledge production would address societal needs and challenges. “We have quite a few [needs]: the issue of energy, the issue of gender-based violence and the like,” he said.
Research Professional News has previously reported on how universities in South Africa are facing rising costs from intensifying periods of rolling blackouts, which also have wider effects on society. “Possibly we need to begin to say [that] five, ten years from now there can be a solution that addresses the electricity and the energy challenge from the research that we funded,” Motloi said.
According to Motloi, partnerships with industry can also help reduce funding waste. Not cooperating can cause “misalignment” and a “lack of coordination”, he said, with duplication a possibility. “You have a few organisations technically offering the same thing, which is something that we should be avoiding because it leads to wasteful expenditure. It limits impact”, he said.
He added that he believed all relevant “role players” should be included in initial conceptualisation discussions for South Africa’s research programmes. “What is happening is that we are not talking to each other,” he explained.
Motloi also said his agency is “highly underfunded”, a sentiment shared by the science minister in his views on the 2023-24 science budget.
Research Professional News is media partner for the Inorms 2023 conference in Durban. Read all of the coverage here.