By Lebone Rodah Mosima
Deputy Minister of Science, Technology, and Innovation Nomalungelo Gina has accused government-owned funding agencies of stifling innovation by rejecting start-up applications without feedback.
Speaking at the opening of Innovation Week at Nasrec, she said the state funders needed to stop dismissing applications without guidance and instead help entrepreneurs improve and resubmit them.
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“To the funders, especially government-owned funding instruments like the Innovation Fund, the Industrial Development Corporation, the Public Investment Corporation, the National Empowerment Fund, and others, please stop this practice of rejecting people’s applications without informing them where their applications or business plans fell short,” Gina said.
“As government funders, we have failed so many people; we have shut down so many dreams and prevented potential innovations because we have no care or patience to provide guidance, despite the business sense an application makes,” she said. “Let’s do better for our people.”
“Start-ups may not be good at paperwork, and hiring consultants to handle it can be expensive,” she said.
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She said the department’s 2022-2032 decadal plan aimed to raise gross expenditure on research and development to 1.5% of gross domestic product from about 1%.
Current levels were inadequate, she said.
“For some time now, R&D funding has been underfunded,” Gina said, adding that industries were not investing enough in research and development.
Universities had also seen a decline in R&D because of revenue pressure, she said.
She said South Africa faced a persistent gap between innovation and commercial uptake, with universities and science bodies sitting on prototypes that were ready for use but not being absorbed by the private sector.
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Gina said government was trying to close those gaps through the Innovation Fund, administered by the Technology Innovation Agency, which is meant to de-risk early-stage technologies and attract private venture capital.
She said that the country faced a skills mismatch as new technologies, including artificial intelligence, reshaped the economy.
“We have a skills mismatch as a country; more graduates are unemployed because they have skills that this gig economy doesn’t really need,” Gina said.
