Entrepreneurship & universities

Government, development partners, firms, learning and research institutions. To ensure production of competitive goods and services, education 5.0 offers incentives to stimulate innovation, including Research and Development (R&D).

The envisioned establishment of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in Bulawayo presents an opportunity for Industry-Academia collaboration. The city has spacious industrial sites and there is still virgin land, which is strategically positioned within the proximity of industries. The envisaged development of industrial parks allied with innovation hubs and SEZ presents various opportunities for researchers to come up with innovations that will lead to the creation of new products and services. The industrial parks will provide hubs for industries to come together, network, create new linkages and develop multi-sectoral synergies.

The innovation hubs will incorporate incubation centers for innovations and inventions that will give rise to new products and ideas that can be applied within the industrial parks and beyond. The issue of value addition is also very crucial in the quest for economic and industrial development.

Universities serve as “anchors” in the emergence of technology clusters (Stanford University, in the heart of the Silicon Valley, being the best-known example). Universities train scientists and engineers, partner with established and emerging technology firms, and develop their own in-house technologies. The desire to increase universities’ applied research outputs and give them a stronger role in the industrialisation process has led the government of Zimbabwe to come up with the education 5.0 Policy initiative to stimulate local industrial development as it adds a “fifth mission” of industrialisation (along with research, teaching, community service and innovation to the mandate of universities.

The presence of the National University of Science Technology (Nust) Innovation Hub creates value by encouraging knowledge flows between academic researchers, students, and industry as well as business, increasing the likelihood of university personnel developing valuable, patentable innovations. Moreover, the presence of an innovation hub reduces the marginal cost for university personnel to establish their own ventures and become innovation hub tenants, increasing the incentives to generate high-quality innovations.

For all these reasons, the presence of an innovation hub should lead to higher quality, patentable innovations emanating from research. University innovation hubs are effective mechanisms for translating academic research into commercially useful innovations and value-adding start-up companies. The Zimbabwean government is encouraging public research organizations to use their inventories of IP rights to create spinouts. Successful spinouts create new jobs, contribute to economic development, and potentially grow into large corporations. Innovation hubs are key players in this effort, but they should balance the interests and mission of the universities with the objectives of the spinout and the needs of society.

The strategy of establishing innovation hubs also includes the initiative of undertaking inward technology transfer into the university, the activation of Nust’s multi-disciplinary human capital strengths to drive innovation and industrialisation. Significant academic outputs, new intellectual properties and stimulation of new industries will be achieved.

The goal of commercializing university technologies is to generate economic growth, the creation of new companies, generation of jobs and attracting additional investment. Because universities and public sector research institutes are often the giants of Research and Development (R&D) within a developing economy, they need to be relied upon as sources for human capital and investment in entrepreneurship, since there may be no other sources. A lot of technologies have been developed elsewhere and there is need for massive technology transfer initiatives to ensure that these technologies are deployed in the provinces and Zimbabwe at large.