The other day, I watched a CNN news clip
about the groundbreaking ceremony for Cornell Tech's campus on New York
City's Roosevelt Island.
This
is a new campus of Cornell University dedicated exclusively to the
applied sciences, with programs being offered collaboratively with
Israel’s Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
This
was not just mere posturing by an American Ivy League university. The
event symbolises an emerging academic revolution globally, which we must
emulate if Africa is to leapfrog in its development.
Higher
education is changing – across the globe. Universities are building
schools of applied sciences to leverage emerging big data that promises
new knowledge and products that will deal with current and future
problems.
This was a visionary project started by the former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg. At the ground-breaking ceremony,
Cornell Tech and their academic partners, the Technion-Israel Institute
of Technology (Israel’s MIT), the oldest and most prestigious
university in Israel, announced a $100 million gift from Bloomberg
Philanthropies to help fund construction of the campus.
The
two institutions had earlier won the bid to build an applied sciences
institution to foster high-tech entrepreneurship in the city.
In
Singapore, policy makers and universities are focusing on biotechnology
at a critical moment in history. While pharmaceutical and biotechnology
businesses around the world are grappling with declining R&D
productivity, the country’s Economic Development Board has spearheaded
the development of an integrated research ecosystem that enables
companies to access multidisciplinary capabilities in a single location.
This
in turn improves R&D decision-making and accelerates drug discovery
and development. More than 30 of the world’s leading biomedical
sciences companies, including GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and Takeda, are
leveraging Singapore as a key home base to drive innovation, growing the
nation’s biopharmaceutical industry by more than 30 per cent in 2011.
Two reports profiled innature.compredict that China will outspend the United States in research by 2020. The OECD Science, Technology and Industry Outlook 2014 and the 2014 Global R&D Funding Forecast jointly published by the Battelle Memorial Institute, and R&D Magazine
concur that China is on track to overtake the United States in research
and development (R&D) spending by the end of the decade.
Other
developing and middle-income countries are also narrowing their gap
with the United States, Europe and Japan, according to these reports.
Most of these countries want to be the ones to create the next Google,
Facebook or Apple. They know that knowledge is the source of wealth.
The
big question is, does Africa know this? It is difficult to tell if you
look at where the continent puts its money. What is clear, however, is
that Africa today stands a good chance of leapfrogging other regions in
research, development and innovation to unimaginable levels.
There
are several factors that could change our fortunes within a short
period of time. First, we must foster collaboration if we are to
succeed.
Our
mind-set is such that we would rather own 100 per cent of a half-baked
idea that is worth Sh10 than contribute collaboratively in order to own
10 per cent of a Sh100 billion idea.
INTERDISCIPLINARY LEARNING
Our
universities do not work well with both the private sector and the
government, and we don’t collaborate enough with global partners. This
disconnect is the source of our failure.
Some
of the research output is scattered. It is for this very reason that
Singapore and New York City are striving to build ecosystems that would
enable innovation to take place.
Second,
just like other universities are doing globally, we must begin to
encourage interdisciplinary programs where the students do not just
focus narrowly on one field. We are killing innovation by offering
narrowly-tailored programs that regurgitate roughly the same content
year in year out.
Like
Mugo Kibati says, if you want to disrupt the insurance industry, you
don’t ask an insurance expert. An outsider is best placed to give a
groundbreaking solution.
The trend globally is to encourage interdisciplinary teaching, which research shows,
advances cognitive ability as well as the ability to recognise bias,
think critically, tolerate ambiguity and acknowledge and appreciate
ethical concerns.
Most
leading universities ensure that each and every student has had a
course in critical thinking, as well as writing-intensive,
reading-intensive liberal arts and sciences courses with public
speaking before they can graduate in their respective fields.
GOVERNMENT MUST RISK
This
is not to say that our curriculum is not adequate. The problem is that
we put too much emphasis on technical expertise, while forgetting that
professionals also need a whole range of non-technical, transferable
skills.
It
is a credit to many of our students that they go ahead and acquire such
skills pretty much on their own. To prepare them adequately for the
future, we must emulate what is happening elsewhere.
Third,
the government must be willing to take the initial risk in areas that
have promise, but where the private sector may not be inclined to take
such risks.
The
investment in the undersea high-capacity Internet cable where the
government took the initial risk is perhaps the best example. Out of
that risk we now have lower-cost broadband that is spurring inclusive
innovation. There are several other areas where such risk can be
underwritten by the government.
There
will be no progress without taking risk. Investment in the energy
sector in Kenya, where much output capacity is needed, is filled with
uncertainties; the private sector is unwilling to build large energy
output due to unfounded fears of market failure.
The
government must therefore take the risk of producing upwards of 5,000
megawatts, leveraging economies of scale in order to lower the price of
energy. This is what will stimulate inclusive innovations at grassroots
level. The absence of infrastructure – energy, roads, and communications
- is the biggest hindrance of innovation.
INITIAL MOMENTUM
Fourth,
we must develop a can-do-it mind-set. We are our own worst enemies
when it comes to local innovation. Sometimes, we fight it outright. Take
for example, the locally designed, tested and developed Wi-Fi hotspot
router, BRCK.
We
have had no ceremonies to celebrate the breakthrough, but are instead
doing everything that needs to be done to kill the innovation through
high taxes for local assembly.
In
other parts of the world, they would leverage such capacity to develop
and expand local production of not just the routers, but also other
Information and Communications Technologies, including the much-needed
laptops for schools.
We
must make the manufacture of BRCK possible just like other countries do
by giving incentives to scale up production. Our appetite for
foreign-manufactured goods over equally competitive local solutions will
never take our country through the learning curve of local production.
It is such production that breeds innovation.
We
have the greatest opportunity now to create a global brand but it must
be the local market that gives the product the initial momentum. We have
seen this in mobile money and Ushahidi.
We
can choose to focus on building unique inclusive innovations or build a
much broader strategy of innovation. The Asian Tigers used a mixed
approach where they leveraged reverse engineering to build capacity, and
after sometime, began to innovate. They combined these skills with
their own home-grown innovations, built institutions and invested
heavily on R&D.
THE SUCCESS OF MIGRANTS
In
other words if you want to build something, you must be doing
something. Never will you wake up one day and make a plane, and compete
with the planes we use today, which have undergone many innovations.
Innovation therefore is a process that takes time. We must start this
process in all industries.
Innovation
and entrepreneurship are inseparable. We must exploit every new idea
that pops up in our mind. Kenya has lost a great deal in failing to
commercialise some of its best creations.
When Peter Drucker wrote his book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship
in 1985, he discussed innovation and entrepreneurship under three main
headings: 1) the practice of innovation (the means by which
entrepreneurs exploit change as an opportunity for a different business
or service); 2) the practice of entrepreneurship; and 3) entrepreneurial
strategies.
Each
of these is an “aspect” of innovation and entrepreneurship, rather than
a stage. He wrote that systematic innovation involves the purposive
search for sources of innovation.
Drucker
refers to these sources of innovation as “windows” of opportunity. For
example, the mobile revolution has become Kenya’s “window” of
opportunity where we now have several innovations that have propelled
our country to the global stage.
In
order to inculcate the culture of innovation, we must teach
entrepreneurship at all levels. Forget the nonsense that entrepreneurs
are born. Several research projects attribute entrepreneurial success to
learning.
Other research points to problems as the source of innovation, that if you are pushed into a corner, you will come out of it.
Many
studies around migrants show that their success is driven to some
extent by the difficulties they encounter in new lands. That is why I
often say that our blessings are the many problems we have.
Any
solution to any one of the problems would lead to a disruptive
innovation. We have the greatest opportunity to innovate and change the
world but we must begin to do something.
START WITH ONE PRODUCT
The
University of Nairobi has organised an Innovation Week for this coming
August. The objective of this annual exercise is to bring together
technology entrepreneurs, business start-ups, investors, and innovators,
and to create an environment for collaboration and co-creation. This
has been a missing link in our quest to develop inclusive innovation.
There
will be opportunities to discuss ideas with experts and possibly
partner to develop new products. Innovation Week will showcase research
from all other universities with the hope that industry will translate
such research into products. Perhaps collaborations will lead to
specialised centers for applied research within universities.
This
initiative by the new Vice Chancellor, Prof. Peter Mbithi, is aimed at
demystifying what we think the university is today and opening a new
chapter where the university is part of the everyday discourse in
changing the world. It is a small start, but as Lao Tsu said, “The
journey of one thousand miles begins with one step.”
As
we move closer to Innovation Week, we must reflect on how to start
collaborations especially between universities and non-academic centers
like I-Hub to start building products we need today as a strategy of
building capacity and new brands for our country. The industrialisation
journey too begins with one product.
The writer is an Associate Professor at the University of Nairobi’s Business School. Twitter @bantigito
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