Tag: science

Landing spacecraft on a comet but still not enough development

Since the landing of the Philae lander on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko yesterday I have been asked a few times times by readers and friends why this is possible, yet we struggle with development, inequality, racial transformation in RSA, exclusion, inclusion and poverty.

I have two answers. Firstly, landing a spacecraft is by now no longer complex, it has become merely very complicated. I mean that once you can figure out the questions, many answers are self-evident. For the parts that are not self-evident you can conduct research and development, and choose between alternatives based on the results. You still have a huge problem with sequencing, but this is why these space missions are so expensive. That is why India can put a spacecraft in space (it is complicated) but still struggle with gender and poverty issues (it is complex). That is why South Africa can host the SKA (very complicated) but not deliver water to communities (complex, as it involves politics, competencies and competing priorities). We just don’t know in which order to solve all the problems in our developing countries, and everything seems to affect everything. Development is complex. In fact, we are not even allowed to fully unpack or discuss the problems because we have become overly sensitive, making things even more complex.

The second answer is about science. For space, we have science. Once politicians allocate funding to an agency, technocrats and scientists take over. We have scientists and engineers arguing about principles, about facts and about theorems. Experiments are conducted. Tests are run. Data recorded, processed and compared. There is a lot of debate allowed and even if criticism is never nice to receive, it helps to refine results, arguments and propositions. There is also the scientific method which means that even if I think I am right I must still convince editors and reviewers and funders with evidence in the form of data and experiments that can be repeated.

Our problem in development is that we do not appreciate criticism, never-mind not relying on proper research. If I question black economic empowerment policies in South Africa I am labelled a racist, even if I believe some kind of redress is needed but I am merely questioning the current modalities. If I question the way donors select value chains based on preferential impact on women I am described as being against inclusion and social justice. If I question the focus on low skilled jobs I am thrown out as a market liberal or capitalist. We just don’t allow sufficient debate backed by proper research. In many countries where I work criticism is not welcomed or appreciated.

I am afraid that the same can be said of the climate change debate, where any person that questions the prevailing consensus is quickly dismissed as a a person in denial.

Preparing for a different manufacturing future

In Africa, we face the challenge of a manufacturing sector that often manufactures products in low volumes. In a country like South Africa, we manufacture a wide range of products but often at low scale. Even our manufacturers that manufacture in larger volumes are still small compared to European or Asian competitors. In some parts of Africa we are further challenged by not having very sophisticated domestic demand in many sectors. When demanding customers are far away it becomes much more difficult to be innovative and well informed of what is possible and what can be done to exceed or at least meet the demands of customers.

But I can sense an important change taking place. I am frequently visiting manufacturers that are becoming much more knowledge intensive. They are smaller and more flexible than their more established competitors, and they combine different skills sets, technology platforms and knowledge bases.

In a forthcoming paper [1] that I co-authored with Garth Williams of the Department of Science and Technology and Prof. Deon de Beer (Vaal University of Technology), we offered the following definition of Advanced Manufacturing.

Advanced manufacturing is an approach that

  • Depends on the use and integration of information, knowledge, state of the art equipment, precision tooling, automation, computation, software, modelling and simulation, sensing and networking;
  • Makes use of cutting edge materials, new industrial platform technologies [2], emerging physical or biological scientific capabilities [3] and green manufacturing philosophies; and/or
  • Uses a high degree of design and highly skilled people (including scientific skills) from different disciplines and in a multidisciplinary manner.

We also argue that Advanced Manufacturing includes a combination of the following.

  • Product innovation: Making new products emerging out of new advanced technologies (including processing technologies).
  • Process innovation: New methods of making existing products (goods or services).
  • Organizational innovation or business model innovation: Combining new or old knowledge and technologies with traditional factors of production [4] in non-traditional fields or disciplines in unique configurations.

I am very proud that our definition of advanced manufacturing was also taken up by the Department of Trade and Industry in their next Industrial Policy Action Plan (IPAP) 2014/15-2016/2017.

The implication is that our technology development, technology transfer and education programmes need to change in order to be better able to equip and support manufacturers. Manufacturers increasingly need to be able to manage multidisciplinary teams using different technologies. These manufacturers must not only be able to learn fast from the market around them, they must be harness and pro-actively develop new combinations of knowledge within their enterprise. Existing or potential manufacturers must also think differently about manufacturing. Smaller factories, using more modern equipment in a flexible way is now a competitive advantage. The entry costs for starting a small manufacturing enterprise has never been so low. For instance, the cost of an automated electronics surface mount production line has come down by more than 70% in less than 10 years. Additive manufacturing allows tooling and products to be developed in parallel, but also makes it possible to develop new products very fast.

Where do South Africa enterprises learn to become more knowledge intensive at the moment? The answer is: At European Trade Shows. If you are a manufacturer or a potential entrepreneur, start saving up. There are many excellent trade shows throughout the year.

Which Meso-organisations offers the best examples, technology demonstration and training on this? Again, European Universities, Technology Transfer centres and universities. (The US and Canada also provide brilliant services, but it is much harder to access for us). If you cannot find a local expert or academics to help you, reach up to Europe.

What do we have to do? Think of ways to get as many of our entrepreneurs curious or interested in the newer technologies available, and learn from our (larger) competitors. Also, we have to get our universities to be more involved in technology adaptation and participating in new research areas. The academia should focus less on publishing in journals and get involved in real research collaboration that gives our industries (exporting) opportunities and that at the same time address unique needs in our domestic markets.

Oh, and by the way. Start reading up on the “internet of things”. Maybe my next post should focus on that.

 

Notes:

[1]  Our paper will be presented at the International Conference on Manufacturing-Led Growth for Employment and Equality in Johannesburg on the 20th and 21st of May. The paper is titled “Advanced Manufacturing and Jobs in South Africa: An Examination of Perceptions and Trends”.

[2] Such platforms have multiple commercial applications, e.g. composite materials, and exhibit high spill-over effects.

[3] E.g. nanotechnology, biotechnology, chemistry and biology.

[4] Labour, materials, capital goods, energy, etc.

 

REPOST: The difference between academic and industrial science

In the last 5 years I have posted my blog articles on the topics around my work. I re-use many of these articles in my ongoing consulting and training work. Below is an article that I originally posted on 20 August 2011. This is one of the popular posts on my blogsite that was posted before I had the current following.

For my frequent readers, please forgive my trip down the archives!

One of my favourite authors on the topic of science is the late John Ziman. Ziman played an important role in popularising science and its role in the technological evolution of societies.  

In his last book, Real Science, he made an important distinction between science in academia, and science in industry. This is relevant to me because I am assisting universities to conduct more relevant scientific research that will benefit industry. At the same time I am assisting industries to intensify their scientific research.

According to Ziman, academic science works towards the Mertonian norms introduced by Robert K Merton in 1942, also known as CUDOS. Merton advanced our understanding of the ethos of the scientific process. I like Ziman’s (2000) discussion of the Mertonian principles. CUDOS is as an acronym that denotes good academic research and stands for:

  • Communalism – fruits of academic science should be public knowledge (belongs to the whole scientific community), and the communication and dissemination of results are as almost as important as the research itself,
  • Universalism – researchers and scientists relate to each other regardless of the rank and experience of the researcher. The norm of universalism requires that scientific findings are evaluated objectively regardless of the status, race, gender, nationalism or any other irrelevant criteria,
  • Disinterestedness – academic scientists have to be humble and disinterested. Work is done in a neutral, impersonal and is often recorded in the passive voice. It disassociates with the personal or social problems, and focus on advancing knowledge or solving a very specific problem in an almost clinical way.
  • Originality – every scientist is expected to contribute something new to the archive, while building on the knowledge of predecessors. Unfortunately this also sometimes constrains how creative academic research can become. “new” could mean new data, questions, methods and insights.
  • Scepticism – This norm triggers important brakes on scientists, as it involves critical scrutiny, debate, peer review and contradiction before being accepted. It is important as it deepens understanding and knowledge from different research perspectives, and should not seen as being completely negative, rather it should be seen as being necessary.

 

Industrial science works towards what Ziman (2000:78-79) calls PLACE:

  • Proprietary – the knowledge is not made public (or at least as little as necessary is made public),
  • Local – it is focused on local technical problems rather than on increasing general understanding,
  • Authoritarian – Industrial researchers act within a hierarchy and must work to please senior management, in other words, it is not serendipitous,
  • Commissioned – it is undertaken to achieve practical goals rather than to just improve knowledge, and
  • Expert – industrial researchers are employed as expert problem solvers, rather than for their personal creativity and writing or teaching skills.

 

Ziman argues that when universities undertake contract research for industry, they somehow cross the boundaries between these two approaches to research. For instance, industry is more interested in solving a specific technological challenge and would prefer that senior researchers work on a problem. In the last 50 years it has increasingly become necessary for universities to raise 3rd stream income, so it a universally accepted practice that universities undertake research for and in cooperation with industry.  However, a university must prioritise the development of interns and junior researchers (and achieve other social goals). Furthermore, industry may not be interested in registering a patent (immediately), otherwise their secrets gets shared with the whole world. Academic researchers on the other hand, are expected to deliver publications when they cannot deliver patents or licenses, thus there is another conflict of their objectives. Perhaps a last comment is that universities are under pressure to solve social problems that are deemed “relevant” by prevailing political pressures, while industry prefer to solve problems that are immediate, relevant and that may even be in contrast with the desires of the prevailing political and social debates. Practically this means that at the moment industry may need to automate to remain competitive, thus incurring job losses, while government and the society may be demanding job creation for people with little or no technical education.

 

Universities must understand this tension, and must operate within and between different modes of conducting research. Current legislation perhaps assumes one standard approach to university research, that always results in something that can be published and or patented (licensed), and it further assumes that the value (and cost) or research is known at the time of start of the research or after completion. Practical experience indicates that this is not always the case. Sometimes the value of research only becomes apparent when it faces market forces.

 

Sources:

ZIMAN, J.M. 2000.  Real Science: what it is, and what it means. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 ZIMAN, J.M. 2003.  Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process. Cambridge Cambridge University Press.

Linking – Posts on innovation and science

Somewhere in December I started to rest and neglected reading some of my favorite blog sites. I have now caught up and here are some important posts that I would like to share with my readers.

One of my favorite authors on innovation, Tim Kastelle, made the following posts:

  • Innovation: Are you a gardener or an architect? You can guess that architects plan their innovations, while gardeners are sensitive to what emerges from their environment. When we deal with economic development, we have too many architects and too few gardeners.
  • Failure is ALWAYS an option. This post is also relevant for practitioners working in economic development. We must use our resources to assist our counterparts to experiment. Their resources are often to scarce or expensive for them to experiment with things that might just fail!

One of my other favorite authors, Duncan Green, posted an excellent summary of research on what White House Policy Makers want from Researchers? This is an important question for practitioners working on promoting science to industry and to government. He provides some interesting comments on the original research that is available from his blog article.

In future I will post articles on systemic thinking and complexity on the Systemic Insight Blog that I co-author with Marcus Jenal

Innovation happens in a systemic context

I am preparing to conduct a 2 day training on diagnosing innovation systems. The participants will be mainly from universities, but there will be also some senior government officials responsible for promoting industrialization and R & D.

I already know what some practitioners will ask me. They will ask “why bother with an abstract concept like an innovation system if we can directly help enterprises to innovate?”

This is not a trivial question. Practitioners from universities that assist enterprises to develop new products, solve problems, conduct research or improve processes have direct evidence that their services are contributing to better results, new products, new markets; in other words, they are directly facilitating innovation.

However, helping one firm at a time is costly, and takes up time. While this kind of 1-on-1 support is necessary, it is not sufficient. Innovation is only to a small extent the result of isolated actions by producers and their technological intermediaries that support them. We need to recognize that there are many other facts that makes it more likely that whole industries, countries or regions will be competitive because they are innovative.

For industries, countries and regions to innovate, a more systemic approach is needed. It must be recognized that innovation rests on:

1. The interaction between companies, which include interaction with:

  • input suppliers,
  • equipment manufacturers,
  • competitors,
  • joint ventures,
  • alliances; and
  • demanding and sophisticated customers

2. The interaction between companies and their supporting institutions:

  • Education institution and training providers that are not only responsive, but creating the skills needed for tomorrow
  • technology extension that reduces the cost of experimentation and that overcomes high costs,
  • knowledge intensive business services and technical consulting services that adds value
  • Research and Development institutions and specialists that are accessible,

3. The framework conditions that determine:

  • the incentive to innovate (which is often related to the pressure by others to compete and try harder)
  • the direction of technical change
  • the overall market conditions domestically

4. The ability to leverage unique regional demand or sophisticated demand to create innovation eco systems

In Africa, we have to focus on using the unique regional demands placed on our industries, our products and our innovation systems. We have to use these unique demands to create supporting institutions, creative firms and specific products that responds to these needs. Because our domestic volumes are often low, we have to focus on making sure that we can better integrate different disciplines, technologies and knowledge bases. This will require much more than innovative products and innovative processes, but will demand that we also create innovative business models.

Conclusion

We have many examples of entrepreneurs who have (despite some very demanding local conditions) managed to create innovative products and processes that have been successful globally. The question we are trying to ask with an innovation systems approach is “how do we increase the chances of our innovators to be successful by creating a dynamic system around the entrepreneurs?”. We recognize that a creative entrepreneur or technologist is not enough to create a new momentum. The whole system around these entrepreneurs need to be dynamic and innovative in itself.

When we get institutions, experts and policies around entrepreneurs to be more innovative, we will immediately see results at the levels of firms, industries and regions.

Sharing links: Scidev.net and the new manifesto

I frequently receive requests for more links, papers and ideas around how science can be related to development. Add Scidev.net to your favourites.  (Thank you, Lucho for bringing the website to my attention.)

At the same time you might want to look at “a new manifesto” that deals with new ways of linking science and innovation for development.  This is an update of the 70’s publication of a radical and controversial document that helped shape modern thinking on science and technology for development. It was called The Sussex Manifesto: Science and Technology to Developing Countries during the Second Development Decade.

Let me know what you think!

Shifting towards innovation and technology application

Have you also noticed that increasingly local economic development is captured by the public sector, often from a governance perspective, while the role of the private sector and its own development gets reduced to a consultative stakeholder? I find this amusing, as the private sector is the acknowledged driver of growth and increased wealth. I have already shifted my attention to the stimulation of technology use and innovation in the private sector, as I cannot imagine a more strategic way to create a new future for our region.

But strangely, the private sector, at least at an organised level, has only in a few places in Southern Africa taken the lead in its own development. While the media and government complains about job losses, firm closures and the increased uncompetitive performance of the industries, industry itself seems to be waiting for government to bail them out!

At the moment I see only a few ways out of the hole that our industries are in. Firstly a more pro-active approach towards the use of technology and innovation is required. Government is not going to donate the machines, and nobody will give a firm the research. Firms need to invest in new technology. Secondly, at a collective level, industry bodies need to move from advocacy towards a more proactive approach of building value chains and industrial networks. Many famous developmental fads like value chains, incubators, clusters etc have their origins in the private sector, even if these instruments are often widely used and abused by the public sector. Why are we seeing so little investment in these instruments by the private sector for the benefit of a specific industry? Thirdly, industry needs to realise that both increased competition and increased globalisation have changed the rules. Just as governments have to deal with immigration and passport issues, business should become a bit more obsessed with shaping the economic, education and science policies of their countries.  If industry does not as a collective become more vocal about education standards, research missions or industrial support then we are in for a tough 20 years!!

Hey, what do you think we can do to inspire our industries in Southern Africa to become better organised and more involved?

How can we get businesses to start investing in the latest technology?

How do we get business to not only innovate in marketing and advertising (we are good at that) but also to invent new business models, new technologies and new solutions to the problems of the world?

Any ideas or proposals are welcome!!

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