Fostering Innovation ecosystems in Public Universities

Innovation methods

Data sources

SDG(s)

Sustainable Development Goal(s)

1No poverty

4Quality education

5Gender equality

8Decent work and economic growth

9Industry, innovation and infrastructure

10Reduced innequalities

11Sustainable cities and communities

17Partnerships for the goals

Disclaimer:

Please be aware that the content herein has not been peer reviewed. It consists of personal reflections, insights, and learnings of the contributor(s). It may not be exhaustive, nor does it aim to be authoritative knowledge.

Title

Please provide a name for your action learning plan.

Fostering Innovation Ecosystems in Public Universities for job creation and industrialization

Challenge statement

Challenge type: If you are working on multiple challenges, please indicate if this is your "big bet" or "exploratory" challenge. Please note: we ask you to only submit a maximum of 3 challenges - 1x Big Bet, 2x Exploratory. Each challenge must be submitted individually.

BIG BET

Challenge statement: What is your challenge? (Please answer in specific terms: "Our challenge is that...”.)

Our challenge is that Uganda, like other countries in Africa, is facing complex challenges – socially, economically, and environmentally, which require integrated and innovative solutions. Moreover, the achievement of SDGs requires transformational solutions that go beyond incremental innovation. Uganda's Public universities like Makerere University and Kabale University, conduct alot of research done by students at various levels but they graduate and start looking for jobs instead of nurturing their researched projects to create jobs or contribute to industrialization.

Background: What is the history of your challenge? What is causing or driving it? Who is involved? How does the current situation look like? What undesired effects does it produce?

University education is not only about innovative teaching and learning methodologies, but also about strategically moulding those innovative methodologies to cultivate new ideas, enhance creativity, encourage collaboration, and promote inclusion and diversity in the society. Universities provide a platform to discuss new ideas, incubate businesses, provide expertise, produce knowledge that is used by technology businesses; they provide public space in which people from various overlapping branches of research meet. Universities should also promote the exchange of knowledge internationally through forming high-tech innovation clusters, by collaborating with relevant national and international agencies, industry, and international institutions and by attracting investment from business and international sources. In this context, Universities in Uganda need to raise their ambitions and act decisively to (i) adopt new mindsets among students and others, (ii) build and trial new development models, and (iii) develop and deploy innovative solutions. Innovation has become an increasingly important opportunity as UNDP continues to provide integrated policy and programme support to the implementation of the National Development Plan III and by extension the implementation of the SDGs.

Quantitative evidence: What (official) data sources do you have on this challenge that better exemplifies the importance and urgency of this frontier challenge? You can add text, a link, or a picture.

Uganda is ranked 121st among the 132 economies in the Global Innovation Index 2023, making it one of the lowest in the world. Uganda ranks 18th among the 28 economies in Sub-Saharan Africa. The major bottlenecks that stifling the emergence of new enterprises from the innovation ecosystem include: (i) Limited academia - industry linkages (ii) Inadequate specialized facilities and human capital to support technology development, product development and commercialization in the various innovation clusters. The impact of this has been the emergence of a weak and uncompetitive private sector that is not producing the desired levels of inclusive growth. The private sector is largely informal Micro, Small, Medium Enterprises close to 80% with a small manufacturing sub-sector which uses basic technology and does not create the quality and quantity of gainful jobs for the youth. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2018, Uganda was ranked 1st in the World with the highest entrepreneurial rate, yet the failure rate of its start-ups is over 90%. Uganda’s start-ups and ventures combined continue to face a high failure rate with more than 60% of these businesses not expected to celebrate their second anniversary mainly due to a lack of innovation. Uganda’s successful structural transformation depends upon the rapid emergence of universities as innovation hubs in terms of multi-disciplinary curriculum, applied and fundamental research studies as well as working closely with the industry through prototype development and commercialization. University education should also be re-oriented towards an “innovation society” to foster not only the engineering and creative production process but also changes in the behaviour and practice of companies and people.

Qualitative evidence: What weak signals have you recently spotted that characterizes its urgency? Please provide qualitative information that better exemplifies the importance and urgency of this frontier challenge. You can add text, a link, or a picture.

Uganda has one of the youngest populations globally. Each year, up to 800,000 Ugandans join the job market. These comprise an estimated 100,000 fresh graduates from universities and other tertiary institutions. Unfortunately, the job market only absorbs a small percentage of these - with the rest having to either create their own jobs or remain unemployed. Even worse is the fact that many of those employed lack the necessary real work environment skills, their qualifications notwithstanding. Experts have largely attributed the growing unemployment of graduates to the static education system and limited practical studies offered by the school syllabus. To address this skills gap UNDP under the Timbuktoo Programme would like to foster innovation ecosystems in public universities by establishing University Innovation Pods (UniPods).

Value proposition: What added value or unique value proposition is your Accelerator Lab bringing to solving this challenge? Why is it your Lab that needs to work on this challenge and not other actors within UNDP, other stakeholders in the country respectively? Why is it worth investing resources to this challenge?

The Innovation space is designed to tap into the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit of young people to promote impact-driven entrepreneurship, foster innovation and leverage business solutions to address youth unemployment. This will be achieved through supporting: i) Exposing a broad range of students across disciplines to the concepts of design thinking and product realization; ii) Youth and enterprises to pilot innovative ideas, or new ways and markets of delivering products and services with a commercial imperative; iii) Providing interested students with both the software for design thinking and the equipment and materials to enable prototyping; iv) Deepen and broaden the understanding and skills of engineering students in digital fabrication; v) The establishment of a functional ecosystem platform to connect young entrepreneurs, Government, Development Partners, financial institutions and all other relevant actors and; vi) Encouraging the production of prototypes that have a high chance of being developed into commercially viable products. These products will facilitate the linkage to industry and private sector collaborations. The above will be achieved through the following services offered at the Mak-UniPod.

Short “tweet” summary: We would like to tweet what you are working on, can you summarize your challenge in a maximum of 280 characters?

Nurturing Innovation Ecosystems in Public Universities for Job creation and industrialization.

Challenge classification

Partners

Who are your top 5 partners for this challenge? Please submit from MOST to LEAST important and state Name, Sector and a brief description of the (intended) collaboration.

Please state the name of the partner:

Makerere University Kampala Kabale University

What sector does our partner belong to?

Academia

Please provide a brief description of the collaboration.

These are Public Universities where UNDP intends to establish innovation spaces in order to nurture innovation through research and development, taping from the talent of young people and the artisanal communities around the public universities

Is this a new and unusual partner for UNDP?

Learning questions

Learning question: What is your learning question for this challenge? What do you need to know or understand to work on your challenge statement?

Does the establishment of innovation space support the creation of startups? How do innovations be incubated before they make it to the market? Does supporting innovations through R&D create Jobs and contribute to Industrialization?

To what stage(s) in the learning cycle does your learning question relate?

Sense, Explore, Test, Grow

Usage of methods: Relating to your choice above, how will you use your methods & tools for this learning question? What value do these add in answering your learning question?

Design Thinking Prototyping Technology Transfer Knowledge Transfer Intellectual Property Registration

Existing data gaps: Relating to your choice above, what existing gaps in data or information do these new sources of data addressing? What value do these add in answering your learning question?

Business incubation and entrepreneurship

Closing

Early leads to grow: Think about the possible grow phase for this challenge - who might benefit from your work on this challenge or who might be the champions in your country that you should inform or collaborate with early on to help you grow this challenge?

Innovations with patents and registered to go to the market for sale.

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