Conference looks at SA’s technological innovations

SCIENTISTS, engineers and researchers exchanged ideas, and projections about the role of science, technologies and innovation during the opening day of the 6th CSIR Biennial Conference in Durban yesterday.

Keynote speakers included Minister of Trade and Industry Rob Davies and founder of Future Nation Schools Sizwe Nxasana.

Davies said technological innovations and disruptive developments had arrived and could not be ignored.

Davies said there were already a number of South African retail stores that were beginning to transform.

He said the country was facing a future with fewer people sitting at tills in retail stores. He said such a development would result in job creation elsewhere, such as in logistics and other skills areas.

Davies said the agricultural sector was relying heavily on technological innovations for quality control, while lawyers take electronic equipment to courtrooms to present evidence.

“The Department of Trade and Industry established a chief directorate that looks at future technologies to understand how middle-class countries should prepare for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Executive director of Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies, a non-profit economic research institute, Saul Levin, said industrial policy also played an important role.

Nxasana, also head of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, took to the podium to discuss the role of skills and innovation, as a driver for industrial development.

“We now live in a knowledge economy and South Africa ranks 61th in the World Economic Forum’s global competitiveness report.”

He said higher education institutions were experiencing stagnant enrolment numbers in the sciences, engineering and technology departments.

He said it was concerning that there were about 300 000 youths who leave school before completing their matric, but were not captured and brought back into the economy by TVET colleges. These were enrolling students who had completed matric.