By Rob Byrne, SPRU, University of Sussex
12th September 2022
Now that our TransCIIT* project has finished, we can reflect a little on what it has achieved and what this may mean. But, before getting to those reflections, it may be useful to recap briefly what the project did.
The full name of TransCIIT – Transforming Climate Innovation Ecosystems through Inclusive Transdisciplinarity – tries to convey the bigger challenge to which our small project was attempting to contribute constructively. It is generally acknowledged that innovation ecosystems across Africa need to be strengthened in many ways. Science, technology and innovation (STI), if nurtured and harnessed well, are expected to make significant contributions to African efforts to achieve the kind of transformative change necessary to realise sustainable development. Effective climate change action is one the imperatives of sustainable development and productive linkages between universities and private firms are crucial for ensuring STI is focused on addressing the problems citizens encounter in any given context. But, more than this, transformative change for sustainability means attending to how STI is conducted, who is involved, and who benefits; it is not just about getting climate innovations to market. This is why we have been concerned in TransCIIT with inclusivity and transdisciplinarity. We have taken inclusivity to mean nurturing the talents of young and female entrepreneurs and students. And transdisciplinarity means bringing together actors from academia, the private sector, policy, and those active as intermediaries, to focus on meeting societal challenges.
Within the frame of this bigger picture, using funding from the Innovation for African Universities (IAU) Programme, TransCIIT sought to connect a small number of climate innovation entrepreneurs with master’s students, working only in Kenya. The central, and simple, idea of TransCIIT is that climate innovation entrepreneurs – especially those who are young and/or female – while building their businesses, meet many challenges they do not have the resources to address. Meanwhile, master’s students are developing specialist skills and knowledge in their courses but have little chance to apply these in real-world problem-solving. If they were to get the opportunity to apply their skills and knowledge, they would not only help to solve real-world problems, but they would also enhance their capabilities along with their confidence and employability. Over the past eight months (January to August, 2022), the activities of TransCIIT have centred on establishing entrepreneur-student matched pairs (nine were established), for which each student agreed with each entrepreneur a business problem that needed solving, overseeing these matched projects to completion, and developing a proof-of-concept website that could be used post-TransCIIT to facilitate this kind of matchmaking service.
All nine matched projects have now completed, covering a range of business sectors and solving – or at least addressing – a range of business problems. And we now have a functioning proof-of-concept website to assist the matchmaking process. On 5 September, we held an online event to showcase TransCIIT’s activities, the nine matched projects, the website, and to discuss TransCIIT’s legacy. There is no space here to discuss the details of the showcase event, but questionnaire responses afterwards suggest it was received extremely well – as an event but, more importantly, in terms of what the participants thought about such a matchmaking service and what they hoped to do post-project. As the lead for TransCIIT, I have to say that I am not only delighted by what we have achieved together (the TransCIIT team but, more significantly, the entrepreneurs and students in their matched projects, and the website developer, Phanuel Mutuma), I am also relieved! We suffered various delays to this phase of TransCIIT, partly because of personal and partly because of administrative reasons. And, as with most projects these days, COVID-19 played its part in slowing things down. The experience of these delays suggests lessons for how to mitigate risks in highly ambitious – and short – projects, and it suggests lessons for project funding models. But these are not reflections I shall consider in this short piece. Instead, as I said at the outset of this blog, I wish to reflect on what TransCIIT has achieved and what this may mean.
One of the enduring impressions for me from the experience this past eight months is from the matchmaking event we held in May. This two-hour online event involved all the entrepreneurs and students who had expressed interest in the service we were piloting and so it is reasonable to assume they felt some degree of enthusiasm for the idea. But they grasped the opportunity so tightly and agreed matches so quickly that it was obvious to us in the TransCIIT team that this service could be in high demand, were it offered more widely. As if to underline this impression, during an in-person meeting at our project partner KCIC’s offices in Nairobi (a meeting arranged as part of the AfricaLics PhD Academy, not for TransCIIT, although the TransCIIT team were present), the discussion between entrepreneurs and PhD students turned towards how the entrepreneurs would really like to be able to make use in their businesses of the skills and knowledge the students possessed. We had not mentioned TransCIIT in this meeting, and we had not asked a question that might have prompted such a discussion. The desire expressed by the entrepreneurs emerged entirely organically. It felt to us that TransCIIT was indeed responding to a bottom-up (latent) demand.
From the comments and feedback expressed in the showcase event, it seems that the matched projects worked in many (if not all) ways for both the entrepreneurs and students. Unsurprisingly, tightly limited resources were perhaps the most important constraint. We were able to pay the students for their time and to provide support for data packages for everyone to meet online along with some travel costs for a few in-person meetings. But we were unable to provide any substantial financial support for the entrepreneurs, such as for investing in equipment. If this kind of service were to be scaled up, these additional sorts of support might be worth considering.
Beyond the benefits of the project to entrepreneurs and students, our partners KCIC and JOOUST said they too see the service as one to continue to develop. KCIC, as a business incubation intermediary working in the climate change action domain, see the potential of being able to connect their SME clients to students who can help solve business problems as an important addition to the services they already provide. And JOOUST, whose master’s students participated in the project, can see the benefit for them in providing better – and more attractive – education and training on their courses.
In terms of the legacy of TransCIIT, there are some points worth raising here. One, several students can now see opportunities to make use of their skills and knowledge post-education as consultants and so may themselves become entrepreneurs. Others will make use of their experience in the matched projects to demonstrate their value to potential employers. Some students have been so enthused by their interactions with the entrepreneurs that they wish to continue their work voluntarily. Two, several entrepreneurs expressed their satisfaction with what the students were able to do for them, saying that they have been able to make huge strides forward in their businesses. They said they were delighted to have been able to get this opportunity and hoped it would be further supported.
So, I think it is reasonable to be pleased with the outcomes of the TransCIIT project, even as we acknowledge its challenges and limitations. There is plenty that we have learned and plenty more to reflect upon as others consider taking up what we have piloted. We believe we have demonstrated the value of a matchmaking service, that a small number of entrepreneurs and students have already enjoyed tangible benefits, that at least two organisations – KCIC and JOOUST – will seek to develop the ideas, and that the matchmaking website can act as an example platform for helping to scale up the service. There will be challenges for institutionalising this, especially in terms of who will pay for students’ time, for additional costs, and potentially for more substantial support for entrepreneurs. Based on what we have seen in the TransCIIT experience, it must be clear that an argument for the government to use some of its R&D budget to fund this kind of service would be strong. The domain of SMEs is often neglected in efforts to support innovation, with much interest instead focused on science-intensive work seeking exciting inventions. There is nothing wrong with this kind of effort but SME innovation activities and the infrastructure that enables these needs serious attention as well.
Our TransCIIT project has made a small contribution to part of the innovation ecosystem bigger picture, ambitious though the project was, given its time and resource constraints. I wish to thank everyone for the part they played in the project, especially the students who worked so hard to complete their matched projects in such a short time. And, on behalf of the TransCIIT team, I would like to offer my best wishes to the entrepreneurs and students as they take forward their individual plans. TransCIIT has been a short but eventful journey for us all.
*TransCIIT includes five partner organisations
KCIC: Kenya Climate Innovation Center
JOOUST: Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology
Plus three partners who already collaborate in the Trilateral Research Chair on Transformative Innovation, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Sustainable Development
ACTS: African Centre for Technology Studies
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