Innovation Infrastructure

According to experts Dana Gorodetsky and Sachin Nijhawan at the William Davidson Institute, the lack of expertise and resources related to the commercialisation of research is a highly problematic issue. In their experience, especially for technology innovations in Africa, more and different resources are needed. Development finance and philanthropic capital can play an important role here. Fortunately, more of this type of funding is becoming available, especially in the energy sector, but Africa lags very far behind. Gorodetsky and Nijhawan propose scaling ventures develop commercialisation roadmaps working alongside local partners (especially given that the realities of doing business are very context-dependent, at the country, region and even community levels). The challenge is that African innovation agencies, research institutes and universities lack some key foundational components. 

A World Bank report concurs pointing to Government efforts - such as subsidies to R&D - having potentially low yield returns because of the lack of investment to date. It suggests that good ideas generated by a university or think tanks, if not picked up by ventures with high technical capability, will not generate value because of the systemic nature of innovation: in essence, good ideas are more likely to flourish with the assistance of all the supporting actors and favourable conditions. The scarcity of a wide array of complementary factors invariably constraints Africa’s full innovation potential. This is why a system lens is indispensable.

Many years ago the late Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen lambasted in Harvard Business Review the failure (and cost) associated with traditional development funding as ‘staggering’. He rightly argued that rethinking the role of development in creating prosperity would have significant impacts. 

Consortiums of governments and large donors have come together. The Coalition for African Research and Innovation (CARI) is at the forefront of Africa’s drive to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through resource mobilisation, strategic advocacy and partnership development. But greater synergy between public and private investment activities can be assisted with better bridging. Clever ways to link state and private venture capital capabilities are now beginning to transpire, but far more intentionality (and leadership) will be required on all sides. 

Even if research value and business value can be suitably aligned then further grant applications will likely be challenging. Spinouts - formal contractual relationships for the use of IP developed at universities - are complex. Singapore and Israel offer helpful examples of how extensive support for R&D and entrepreneurship in key sectors, such as research facilities, open access to data and financial assistance, such as tax incentives and grants, work well, as a model from which to learn. Even if these perhaps stand a long way out of conceptual reach. 

Place-based innovation policies that have context-specific policy objectives in mind are important. Focused efforts on innovation policies which support local institutions in their efforts to address community needs are being implemented by Innovate UK KTN Global Alliance, which is operating in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. This is a logical start, especially with the right local buy-in from the offset. A recent report commissioned to identify specific challenges pointed to serious problems with the support currently being provided by the local technology, science and innovation community in Gauteng in South Africa, one of the best supported ecosystems on the continent. 

In sum, support needs are deep and wide, with big gap demands - greater cohesion, clearer accountability, more information sharing, better human-centred design, and action (not just talk). Significant work will be needed to ensure such well-intentioned programmes ‘stick and stay’ and are not perceived as yet another short-run initiative which is absent of tangible, long-lasting outcomes.    

Nigerian entrepreneur and investor, Tony Elumelu, came up with the term Africapitalism over a decade ago, which includes notions of greater economic prosperity and social wealth driven by Africa’s private sector.  Leading academic, Professor Kenneth Amaeshi, has written extensively about how the study of capitalism in Africa often assumes strong institutional contexts and actors, which includes strong governments, civil society, and effective or efficient regulations and governance. But this is not always the case. Africapitalism is an imaginative discourse, which could be extended to specific infrastructural considerations too.  

Given the vast capital investment that will be necessary to transform Africa’s underlying innovation infrastructure (coupled with the fact this will take a considerable amount of time), it is reasonable to ask: what activities should be instigated to ensure pragmatic solutions are created most immediately?  

Whilst acknowledging the clear local demand opportunities to help shorten supply chains, promote circular design, and improve links with the informal sector on a regional scale, efforts should also be directed at building off the base of Africa’s unique creative ingenuity. This should be harnessed to positively direct meaningful change, as in the success case of Nollywood, which is a stand out case of bottom-up entrepreneurship. 

Clearly universities have important roles to support the foundations and drive sustainable innovation ecosystems. They educate and train entrepreneurial talents, but can go further in taking strategic roles via high-impact research, building bridges to translate global knowledge into local use, and providing technical commercialisation know-how. 

Governments should work with universities to improve the wider training available in innovation leadership for those doing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) masters and PhDs, who are particularly well-placed to take innovative ideas from lab to market. Large-scale national innovation leadership programmes can provide clearer paths for scientists and engineers to take their skills and knowledge from the lab to commercialisation with a focus on developing market-ready solutions for critical challenges in conjunction with scaling ventures. 

To date, multilateral efforts targeted at this area have been piecemeal or have failed entirely. An Africa-Europe Innovation Partnership (AEIP) pilot project to connect high-quality tech hubs to explore opportunities for mutually beneficial partnerships ran until September 2021. A short-term Advisory Group on African-European Research and Innovation Cooperation also concluded in October 2021. Instead of episodic design features, better long-term strategic planning is fundamental. 

Bigger plans, such as the African Development Bank spending $45m on the development of a Pan-African University - establishing five African institutes to focus on science, technology and innovation - are more along the right lines. More recently, Innovation Centres of Excellence are being planned (although seemingly via traditional incubation efforts). More of these investment activities are needed, but they need to connect to high-growth firms, (impact) investors, and wider ecosystem support actors, to work effectively. The dots are not being joined.   

Initiatives such as the InnovationXChange platform - which purports to bring together researchers, innovators, policy-makers, academics, civil society for exchange knowledge, skills around emerging R&I topics are another well-meaning but entirely dysfunctional, box-ticking IT platform, supply-side solution, designed by academics and bureaucrats, which do not serve as functional communities of practice linked to scaling ventures. It is highly likely that all such efforts will lead to more wasted opportunities and outcome deficits. The African Union Commission (AUC), the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the plethora of other UN agencies have to more closely align and refocus attention toward scaling ventures (not micro SMEs). The aforementioned challenges require urgent rectification with revised solutions needing to rise to the top of development agendas. 

Research has shown a variety of interconnected micro-innovation ecosystems mutually reinforce each other and make the entire system successful. These innovation districts, science parks, and innovation clusters are medium- to long-term bets. 

Africa is starting from a relatively low base - research has shown that a decade ago Africa was largely excluded from these developments. Whilst networks of innovation hubs are now developing, often these function more as co-working spaces, which should not be confused with real innovation centres of excellence. Technical innovation centres are missing investment gaps, which could be crucial in supporting the next generation of circular, green, inclusive transformative scaling ventures.   

Some helpful initiatives should be acknowledged: the Kenya National Innovation Agency (KeNIA) is working to develop guidelines for enhancing technology transfer and commercialisation and coordination of Innovation hubs. It recently brought together around 50 key national and international stakeholders, representing various institutions in Kenya, universities, private sector, innovation hubs and startups alongside the OACPS and EU funders. Whilst this is a step in the right direction, far bigger leaps are needed.

A number of initiatives are beginning to promote Africa at the forefront of the Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda. Sadly most efforts to promote commercialisation of innovation, tech-transfer, clustering tend to be tactical and short run: a selected cohort of SMEs working on time-focused challenges, often culminating with a showcase event. Such ephemeral approaches will not lead to lasting change.  

A strategic play would be broad collective commitments to strengthen specialist innovation centres (not “innovation hub” co-working spaces) across Africa to support tech transfer and commercialisation avenues for scaling ventures. Both physical and virtual centres can support cutting-edge R&D infrastructure including laboratories, testbeds, research centres, with technical experts that prove and adopt breakthrough products, processes, services and technologies. Some innovations need little or no specialised infrastructure: a rapid internet connection may be enough to deploy an app, created on a laptop, at scale. In other cases, specialised innovation infrastructure for testing, experimentation and scaling is essential, including large-scale scientific equipment, specialised testbeds, measurement and testing capabilities.

Far more needs to be done to strengthen and deepen networks between existing research and innovation actors, address research infrastructure gaps (both in universities and in other institutions focusing on applied research and innovation in collaboration with industry), strategically supporting (actually working to serve) important business areas.

There remain low levels of awareness and understanding about the merits of open innovation and open knowledge. Many companies remain extremely worried about value “leaking” from collaborations with outsiders. Closed mindsets prevent the possibilities of enterprises and organisations reaping the wide benefits, which are well-known, if poorly categorised. Smart companies take a leap of faith and collaborate, without risking negative exposure. Open innovation enables community participation, distributed accountability, and knowledge creation—all behaviours that provide the groundwork for scale.

Examples of successful open collaboration innovation approaches in Kenya and Nigeria have shown that embracing an open innovation culture allows ventures to optimise their business models, while not losing sight of their specific product and service offerings. Other benefits include improved networking and skills development opportunities, and fewer access to finance barriers.

“There is a default reluctance to share knowledge, because you don't have guarantees about how you're going to benefit, bearing in mind that it’s your USP. There needs to be a campaign to promote open knowledge and open innovation, and to get startups and entrepreneurs to recognise the benefit of this approach. A deliberate injection of a compelling mechanism to drive that kind of message and to make entrepreneurs recognise that there is actually a win-win process. Tech hubs can convene and drive this kind of process and bring these other stakeholders, from universities to government sectors and NGOs, together. Some of that is happening already. But it needs to be done in a more structured way”. - interviewee

African Governments could also learn from NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) which has worked for years to bring open innovation to the organisation using crowd-based challenges, which led to considerable success. Small scale attempts have been made by GIZ’s Make-IT in Africa and Digital Solutions for Development (DSSD) to promote an Open Innovation Programme. Efforts must go considerably further.  

An interviewee acknowledged much more can be done and we should be “working towards more access to open source information, as tools to create solutions, as it’s a very important piece. But industry needs to be more democratic”.

Industry can reflect on how to improve their contributions, but far more strategic approaches will be needed to purposely bring together key stakeholders in new ways for different results. Progress is more unlikely if relying on either hope or chance.    

Networks are often reliant on connections built up through years of experience within the same industry. This can be particularly challenging for relatively young scale-ups, especially those established by less experienced entrepreneurs, even more so if they have not worked or studied abroad. These younger management teams need to establish and connect with strong global networks.

Breaking silos and developing quality networks within the African tech-startup ecosystem is critical for bridging knowledge gaps, reducing information asymmetries and connecting ecosystem players to new opportunities. Initiatives to connect African businesses with relevant partners in global innovation hubs are too rare. Europeans have strong embassy networks and innovation agencies stationed at relevant localities whose job is to assist companies with obtaining a head-start in the specific market. It would be sensible for African international trade teams to consider what more can be done to support scale-ups exploring opportunities outside of Africa. In turn, international department agencies and trade teams can foster stronger bilateral partnership opportunities for African firms wishing to connect in new markets.

Government policies to promote the flow and exchange of ideas between firms and across international borders, and to support technology transfer, further enhances innovation. Sadly international governments’ efforts to support the entrepreneurial ecosystem tend to lack originality by crowding into the incubation and acceleration space via broadly undifferentiated offers. Often these can be thinly veiled, neo-colonialist trade cloaks, sometimes offering the best African SME ‘brain-drain’ startup visas. A reframe is needed. As would directing better support towards targeted scaling ventures to establish far closer connections in key market urban epicentres around the world. 

Several years ago, 14 of Africa’s top tech startups were offered tours of Europe to pitch to investors, explore international opportunities and learn about technology markets. These types of programmes can be conducted virtually. The Africa Berlin Network is a more recent collective platform that brings together communities for mutual network benefits. Countries outside of Africa have formalised activities through dedicated mechanics, such as the EIT Hub Israel, which was established with the mission to nurture and create synergies with the Israeli innovation ecosystem and support the respective growth of innovative EU and Israeli startups. The International Trade Centre could play an important role here in Africa, working alongside international governments and their respective embassies, but critically the focus must be on scaling ventures as the goal has to be supporting their  internationalisation growth prospects outside of the African continent.  

“If we fail in creating future leadership, and the sense that Africans cannot solve their own problems, it would be tragic.” - interviewee

Governments have been encouraged to devise stronger mechanisms for corporate-startup collaboration by creating platforms for scaling ventures to collaborate with corporates and other partners, and develop experimental leadership learning models.  

Co-lab models can stimulate the breaking free of constraints and allow for the non-linear, unpredictable design of radically different, bold possibilities. Anti-siloed approaches force closer cross-working and collaboration. Time and resource allocation efficiencies can be realised through focusing on precise, tightly-defined opportunities. Burden and commitment towards common objectives should be shared across multiple, non-competing cooperative organisations. Knowledge, skills, tech and expertise can be exchanged across mutually beneficial forums.

Senior, multi-stakeholder actors need to work together to define new pathways, drawing in non-traditional teams, diverse talent and broad-based expertise. Too often policy is developed in silos, without sufficient input from the ecosystem. Participatory models - led by scaling ventures and drawing in a diverse set of stakeholders via inclusive co-design and syndication processes - can lead to breakthrough-thinking. 

Elitist fellowship models, and executive education more generally, can be recast into co-development models that bring together stakeholders in new ways for different results. It will take leadership to construct new ways to improve co-design approaches which are truly innovative to ensure shared learning that fosters synergistic discovery, mutual exchange, and (joint-)implementing action between scaling ventures, government, ecosystem actors, and academia in concert. We encourage organisations to think, then go beyond, the conventional and into breakthrough innovation territory, as depicted by Figure 21.