African governments must empower state research and innovation promotion institutions to create intellectual properties that can be transferred to businesses with the expertise and resources to commercialise them, while also ensuring access for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the Chief Executive Officer of Heritors Labs Limited, Derrydean Dadzie, has said.
Mr Dadzie argued that such an approach would address the stagnation of scalable innovations that remain confined to laboratories, strengthen intra-African trade, and enhance the continent’s contribution to the global innovation ecosystem.
“Fixing cross-border research and innovation collaborations can unlock enormous opportunities for intra-Africa trade, make discussions around innovation commercialisation more fluid, and ultimately impact the socio-economic development of the continent and its people,” he said.
Speaking at the opening of the ARICS Cross Border Webinar Series on the theme “Moving Innovation Beyond Islands: Building Cross-Border Markets that Integrate Africa’s Research and Industrial Ecosystems”, he lamented the disconnect between research hubs, investors and the business community across Africa.
“We’re more powerful if we’re able to collaborate and jointly co-create and solve our problems, including harmonising funds, expertise and resources in a more targeted approach towards the upscaling of African innovations and research outcomes,” he added.
It is estimated that about 90 per cent of Africa’s SMEs are not connected to the research and innovation ecosystem, meaning that industries capable of commercialising research into tangible products often lack direct links to such inventions.
Supporting Mr Dadzie’s call, the Chief Executive Officer of South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Dr Thulani Dlamini, said linking innovation hubs to industry would enable SMEs to leverage the infrastructure and support of research institutions to improve market access. He stressed that challenges to cross-border commercialisation extended beyond securing intellectual property rights, citing the absorptive capacity of SMEs, the nature of the technologies being transferred, and the mechanisms for such transfers as limiting factors.
“Access to capital remains the major challenge. With the necessary funding, small and medium-sized enterprises can acquire intellectual properties or innovations from research institutions and commercialise them. That is how we can realise economic dividends such as job creation and increased commercialisation of innovation and research outcomes,” Dr Dlamini said.
The webinar, held after the second edition of the Africa Research and Innovation Commercialisation Summit earlier this year in Accra, reinforced the need for policies and systems that facilitate cross-border trade in research-based innovations.
Other speakers, including Mr Ian Korongo, Head of Innovation and Commercialisation at the Kenya National Innovation Agency (KeNIA), and Dr George Acheampong, Coordinator of the Innovation and Incubation Hub at the University of Ghana Business School, called for sustained high-level engagement to improve the transfer of commercially viable innovations across borders.
“Policy frameworks exist in almost every country, but implementation has been lagging. This requires sustained collaboration at national and political levels,” Mr Korongo said.
Dr Acheampong raised concerns over how intellectual property rights are allocated under most mutual recognition agreements, stressing the need for co-creation in innovation. “A laboratory that facilitates co-sharing could significantly advance the commercialisation of research and innovation outcomes across borders,” he said.