The coupling of research and commercialisation

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

With transforming Sri Lanka into a knowledge based economy ranking high amongst the current national objectives, the Ministry of Technology and Research for the first time in Sri Lanka will host a ‘Technology Marketplace,’ an event which will seek to link scientific research with industries in order to strengthen the Ministry’s commitment to convert the country into a knowledge hub.

The Technology Marketplace will provide an opportunity for investment as well as a platform to forge partnerships that will ensure that research findings are utilised to add value to industrial products, contribute to the development of the industry and thereby to the national economy.

The Marketplace which will be held on 24 and 25 October is one of several initiatives envisaged by the Ministry to bridge the gap that exists between research and industry and to bring industries to collaborate more closely with public research institutions.

Knowledge transfer

“We are talking of enhancing industrial products, increasing export earnings, having more globally competitive products out in the market. We are very conscious of those national objectives that have to be achieved so our question was that having so many science and research institutions under this ministry, how do we contribute?” explained the Secretary to the Ministry of Technology and Research Dhara Wijayatilake.

Knowledge based economy requires knowledge transfer and using knowledge to ultimately contribute to economic development, to achieve national objectives she added. An analysis on what the Ministry is currently doing to contribute to those national objectives showed that there were certain areas in which it can do better. One of the most important areas highlighted was to encourage innovation, entrepreneurship and to make sure that research progression to commercialisation happens.

Right now the way it is, our scientists are doing their job well, Wijayatilake stated. They are engaged in research activities and projects and have findings that are the outputs of that research but at the same time she admitted that not enough was being done to help the scientists’ progress beyond the research output.

“We can’t expect our scientists to be good business people. We needed to bring in business interventions, business models, bring in the business expertise to bridge the progression gap and that is what we are trying to do. How do we do that? We have to inspire some confidence in the industry to work with the Government,” she asserted.

“What we thought we would first do is create an awareness about the potential that these research institutions have, to partner with industries, help them enhance their products to make them more commercially viable and more globally competitive, to add value to their products because some of our industries cannot survive unless they have value additions; they cannot just go on as they are now because the global market is becoming much more competitive. Knowledge transfer is used in a huge way to add value to products and we have to keep up.”

The Secretary to the Ministry pointed out that the country’s industrial export earnings have to improve and that industries have to assisted to improve their products – it is there that there is a huge role to be played by science research institutions.

The Technology Marketplace programme

The Technology Marketplace essentially will be all about providing a space and an opportunity for scientists to get together with industrialists. The Ministry will showcase to the industrialists what potential the research institutions have and will talk to them specifically about how they can tie up with industries while at the same time receive their feedback on what they expect from research institutions.

“In essence what we are trying to do is to shift the balance. Hitherto we have had a real supply push approach. We now want to balance it with a demand pull approach. We will engage with the industry from the inception to ask them what their needs are; the needs assessment will be done at the beginning. The coupling of the industry with the research scientist, we want that to happen right at the beginning so that we have a pretty good understanding of what we need to respond to when it comes to the needs of the industry.”

The marketplace will consist of three specific features. There will be stalls at which research products and findings will be showcased in addition to stalls at which standards will be discussed. This has been included in the programme become according to Wijayatilake, in order for industries to become globally competitive, standardisation is absolutely important as conforming to global standards provides an economic advantage.

She pointed out that Sri Lanka currently does not have a huge culture of conforming to international standards which can actually be a setback to industrialists and the importance of standards and how they can be adopted will hence be discussed.

Technical sessions at which the industrialists will speak will also be held. Private sector partners who have been invited make presentations, people who have already been engaged with the Ministry’s research institutions to talk about what their experiences have been and what can be done to improve the partnership. This will be followed by the institutions talking about the work they do.

The third leg of the event will consist of one-to-one sessions where industrialists will be given the opportunity to have a closed door session with the particular research institution to discuss how they can establish partnerships and move forward.

“During the technical sessions, we will talk also about intellectual property rights, which are very important in commercialisation. Dr. Anita Gupta, a scientist from India will be present at the technical sessions to talk about the entrepreneurship models that India has followed – we have specially invited someone from India because we recently signed a programme of cooperation with India, a science and technology cooperation programme,” said Wijayatilake.

She added that the Ministry is already in a collaborative partnership through the national technology initiative, a PPP called ‘Nanco.’ Three directors from the initiative, MAS Holdings Chairman Mahesh Amalean, Dialog Axiata PLC Director and Group Chief Executive Hans Wijesuriya and Hayleys Agriculture Holdings Ltd.

Managing Director Rizvi Zaheed amongst several others will address the gathering at the first panel discussion. This will be followed by an interactive discussion at which more of partners will participate.

Another interesting feature at the Technology Marketplace will be the involvement of the Ministry of Defence’s Centre of Research and Development. Scientists involved with this organisation have conducted research and developed prototypes of machinery and equipment and they are now ready to showcase their findings and go into commercialisation and so will also be present at the marketplace.

Show and tell to the industry

“It’s actually our show and tell to industry event, to show what our potential is and we believe that this is a very important initiative that will contribute to the national economy, to the enhance the global competitiveness of industry products, to improve industrial exports, and of course ultimately to contribute to the development of the national economy,” she explained.

The Secretary was very clear about the fact that the Technology Marketplace was not a one-off event. They plan on receiving feedback from participants about what they did well and what they could do better. The Ministry will then analyse how useful this has been to achieve their objective of having better tie-ups with industries.

“This showcasing our potential is not the only thing that we mean to do, we need to improve the way we do business in government so we will look at what the problems are and we will gauge through this initiative the Ministry’s potential and by talking to the industry, find out what we can do with them - whether we can actually achieve anything in the next few years,” Wijayatilake emphasised.

“We can’t expect results in just a year – we would have to see if there are more industry tie-ups, whether the research institutions are generating more income for themselves, whether the industries are showing more interest in adding value to their products and working with government research institutions – we want to inspire confidence in the industries. We will set ourselves some targets, identify key performance indicators and monitor the success. A year is too early to assess the outcome.”

The Ministry has hosted a pre-marketplace discussion to which it invited a few industrialists and was very encouraged by the feedback. The industrialists praised the initiative as a novel feature as the Government hasn’t done anything like this before and really appreciated it.

This is one of the initiatives to bridge the gap between research and commercialisation, to bridge the research progression gap but this alone is not enough, she stated. To work towards a knowledge based economy, secondary schools and the universities need to get involved.

“We have to be able to entice our scientists to stay because right now Sri Lankan scientists are all around the world helping other countries get rich and we have to find ways and means of keeping them back and keeping inspiring them to come and work with us in this country – a solution has to be found to this brain drain.”

The Sri Lanka Inventors Commission has drawn up a completely new corporate plan which is very ambitious and is spot-on to encourage innovation, to provide funding, joint venture funding, Wijayatilake revealed.

“All of this is focused on commercialising research, encouraging and assisting entrepreneurship, encouraging innovation and inspiring innovators and giving them assistance economically because people who have ideas don’t necessarily have money. Those are things we believe are very necessary to contribute to the establishment of a knowledge based economy. We have a huge amount of potential in terms of human resources in this country and we need to tap into the potential,” she concluded.

The Technology Marketplace will be held at the BMICH on 24 and 25 October 2011. For more information on the Marketplace, visit www.motr.gov.lk which contains a technology marketplace link which will provide more information on the event, the programme and the online registration.