By Rob Byrne, Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex

Transforming Climate Innovation Ecosystems through Inclusive Transdisciplinarity (TransCIIT) project

For any effort to develop transformative innovation policy, there must exist some form of innovation system that can be nurtured to achieve its implementation. Two kinds of actors often said to be key to such an innovation system are universities and profit-seeking firms. However, despite well-established theory on the importance to innovation of these two kinds of actors and the linkages between them, there remains much to do to realise this part of innovation systems across many African countries. With funding from the Innovation in African Universities (IAU) programme, our Transforming Climate Innovation Ecosystems through Inclusive Transdisciplinarity (TransCIIT) project is seeking to pilot a service in Kenya that matches the needs of climate entrepreneurs with the skills of master’s students, thereby exploring how to develop and strengthen university-industry links and contribute to building innovation systems that can nurture transformative change. But, in line with the transformative ambitions suggested by the TransCIIT project’s full name, we are seeking not only to explore how to develop and strengthen university-industry links but also to promote what we have called inclusive transdisciplinarity. By this we mean promoting the active and equal participation in Kenya’s climate innovation ecosystem of small and medium-sized enterprises run by female and/or young entrepreneurs.

TransCIIT brings together five partners, each with their own capabilities relevant to innovation system building in general and the needs of Kenya’s climate innovation ecosystem in particular. One is the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), which is a well-established science, technology and innovation (STI) ‘think tank’, who have existing strong links to the project’s other two partners in Kenya – Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology (JOOUST) and the Kenya Climate Innovation Center (KCIC). Also on the African continent, the project includes the partnership of the University of Johannesburg (UJ) who, through the Trilateral Research Chair on Transformative Innovation (TRCTI), provide important expertise on innovation systems and informal sector entrepreneurship. And part of the TRCTI along with UJ (and ACTS), the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex in the UK is leading the project, connecting it with the work of the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC).

So far in TransCIIT, we have identified a group of entrepreneurs and a group of master’s students who are interested to participate in our pilot matchmaking service. On 17 May 2022, we brought these entrepreneurs and students together in an online matchmaking event during which they could talk directly to each other to see if they could agree in principle paired matches that could be further specified as short projects each student could undertake to solve or address the business challenges of the entrepreneurs. At the time of writing, we have nine in-principle matched projects that we aim to help progress to full implementation, and to completion by around the end of July 2022. Alongside these matched projects, we are looking to develop a proof-of-concept website that could be used to facilitate this kind of matchmaking service after TransCIIT has finished, which should be around September 2022. And, after the matched projects are complete, we aim to showcase the results and to discuss with policymakers and other innovation ecosystem stakeholders in Kenya, how the policy environment can help to institutionalise this kind of service across the country with lessons, perhaps, for other countries in Africa.

There is no space to describe the details of the various steps we have so far taken in the project and so we aim to share these details in separate blogs, each written from different perspectives within TransCIIT, and to produce other blogs as the rest of the project unfolds. Our project will not in itself transform Kenya’s climate innovation ecosystem, but we do hope to generate lessons on how to do so and to share these widely. As such, we invite you to follow KCIC, JOOUST, ACTS, UJ and SPRU on our TransCIIT journey and to share your own thoughts on what we are doing and what you may be doing yourselves in similar kinds of transformative innovation spaces.