Innovation in sub-Saharan Africa: Competitiveness, capability and achievements in South Africa, Nigeria and Uganda (original) (raw)
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Interactions among academia and industry as a research theme is getting more and more attention of scholars from different fields and policy makers, due to the synergy of these relationships and what they can generate as benefits in terms of innovation, technology, development and economic growth. Literature in this field provides evidences, practices and several aspects of university-industry linkages worldwide. However, little is known about Africa and knowledge about this phenomenon is still limited. This paper is aiming to give a state of the art of different incarnations of university-industry linkages in Africa through analysing literature and secondary data. We identified 31 African countries in The Global Innovation Index reports (from 2011 to 2018), which has an index on university-industry research collaboration. Then, we gathered literature of those countries by searching related keywords to university-industry linkages. Based on what we obtained as information, we build a general idea about this phenomenon in African context, exposing realities and challenges, leading the way to new research streams for future studies.
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Scientometrics, 2018
As a result of the growing interest on University-Industry Linkages (UIL)' research, systematic literature reviews and bibliometric studies have been undertaken to describe the state-of-the-art and provide a quantitative overview of the literature on UILs. However, these reviews have mainly enhanced the visibility of UILs' literature targeting developed countries. UILs' literature focusing on developing countries, particularly on Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), is generally less visible. This paper seeks to fill this gap and to enhance the visibility of UILs' focusing on SSA, by undertaking a systematic literature review and displaying its bibliometric portrait. More specifically, the paper addresses the evolution, sources, main research questions, units of analysis, methods, countries researched, the influence of this literature, as well as its main findings. Based on Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar, 230 relevant articles have been identified and analysed. The paper's findings demonstrate that, while SSA continues to be an under-research terrain, the quantity of literature targeting this continent seems to be substantial and higher than it is often portrayed. The findings also demonstrate the dominance of South Africa, Nigeria and developed countries, both as knowledge producers and consumers of literature focusing on SSA. African poor countries seem to suffer from a double neglect: they are under-researched, but also ignored when research on them is produced. The paper argues, therefore, for the need to reconsider the place of African low-income countries in UILs' research, both as empirical fields and as incipient knowledge producers.
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The Journal of Technology Transfer, 2017
Firms and economic policy makers need an enhanced understanding of universities, in terms of what academics value and how they interact, if they are to enhance collaboration around the generation and transfer of knowledge and technology between universities and industry. The literature increasingly focuses on identifying incentives and barriers within universities, but is largely limited to contexts in Europe and the USA, and favours individual over institutional determinants. The paper contributes by situating university-industry linkages within the total pattern of academic interaction with external actors, in diverse types of institutions. Empirically, it extends the literature to investigate trends in an immature national system of innovation in a late developing economy context, South Africa. The analysis maps the heterogeneity of academic engagement, focusing on firms, through principal component analysis of an original dataset derived from a survey of individual academics. It concludes that the incentives that drive academics and that block university-industry interaction in contexts like South Africa, are strongly related to universities' differentiated nature as reputationally controlled work organisations, and to the ways in which they balance and prioritise their roles in national development.