Transcript Higher Education South Africa

Higher Education South Africa
THE VOICE OF HIGHER EDUCATION LEADERSHIP
The Science and Technology
Ministerial Review Report
South African Higher
Education Institutions and
the National System of
Innovation
THE VOICE OF HIGHER EDUCATION LEADERSHIP
Remit (1)
In July 2010, Minister of Science and
Technology constituted a Review
Committee. The purpose of the
committee was to
• review the Science, Technology and
Innovation landscape and its readiness
to meet the needs of the country;
• appraise the degree to which the
country is making optimal use of its
existing strengths;
Remit (II)
• assess the degree to which the country
is well positioned to respond rapidly to
a changing global context and meet the
needs of the country in the coming ten
to thirty years.
The study was to provide the nation with
an understanding of what is being
achieved in and by the National System
of Innovation (NSI).
Phase One
• Phase one comprised scrutiny of the
relevant policy framework established
since the adoption of the White Paper
on Science and Technology in 1996,
and evaluation of the systemic
response to the external review of the
South African National System of
Innovation (NSI) conducted by the
Organisation
for
Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD)
in 2006/2007.
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Phase Two
• Phase Two focused on the development of
recommendations for a greatly enhanced NSI.
In particular Phase Two was expected to make
recommendations regarding
• Framework conditions to achieve coordination and
coherence
• Appropriate institutional arrangements and structures
that would direct the NSI
• Location and levels of investment responsibility for the
NSI, including government, business, foreign support
and other sources of funding
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WHAT IS AN NSI
• The idea of a National System of Innovation rests on the
importance of linkages and interactions among
organisations and institutions in the creation of
knowledge, its transfer and the development of
innovations.
• The main actors are business, government research
laboratories and universities.
• Government plays many roles: setting framework
conditions, providing infrastructure, human resource
development;
• Framework conditions: policies; regulations, tax
incentives.
Governance of the NSI
(I)
Assessment:
• Department of Science and Technology
achievements reviewed – much that is
positive.
• Lack of shared understanding across
Government departments of conception of
National System of Innovation;
• Poor inter-governmental coordination and
cooperation;
• Many sectoral S&T services underperforming.
• Failure of ‘New Strategic Management Model’
for SETIs.
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Governance of the NSI (II)
• The trust placed in voluntary inter-departmental
cooperation has not been realised;
• Virtually no prospective NSI planning as envisaged
in the White Paper has been possible;
• There is still too little systemic coherence and sense
of common purpose between the private sector,
Government, Higher Education and civil society;
• There is an absolute requirement for coherent
information-gathering and analysis for effective
agenda-setting and prioritisation in the NSI, and for
the achievement of clearer and better-aligned
institutional missions and functioning of the
agencies.
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Governance of the NSI
(III)
Establish a statutory
National Council on Research and
Innovation (NCRI) chaired by
Deputy President; representatives
from Government, private sector,
HEIs, Research Councils, Labour,
Civil Society. Responsible for
oversight of NSI.
Recommendation 2: Establish a Unitary
Research and Innovation Vote.
Recommendation 1:
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Governance of the NSI
(IV)
Recommendation 3: The
primary function iof
Ministry and Department of Science and
Technology would be a systemic formulator
and co-ordinator of NSI-related policy and
strategy, consistent with decisions of NCRI,
allocating macro-resources andpromoting the
system.
Recommendation 4: Transform the present
National Council on Innovation (NACI) into a
new statutory Office for
Research and
Innovation Policy (ORIP).
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Governance of the NSI
(V)
Recommendation 5: Establish three ‘core
NSI nexuses’ by written agreements.
– Post-school education and training involving the
Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and
the DST
– Business and enterprise development, involving at least the
departments of Trade and Industry (the dti), the Economic
Development (EDD), Public Enterprises (DPE) and the DST
– Social development and social innovation, involving the
DST and departments concerned with social and rural
development, and the social security, health and education
complex.
Governance of the NSI
(V)
Recommendation 6: Broaden
modes of
public grant-making: participatory
sectoral funds’.
Recommendation 7: Review,
re-think and
integrate the ‘Science Councils’ and the
Government S&T services system.
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The enabling environment for
NSI (I)
Assessment:
• Deep-seated gap between business and
government (too little joint participation,
decision-making, benefit-sharing, etc).
• Tax incentive schemes under-subscribed.
• Innovation survey ‘hides’ low patenting and
international impact of business innovation.
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The enabling environment for
NSI (II)
• Falling contribution of business to Higher
Education and Science Council R&D .
• Technology balance-of-payments poor.
• Technology and Human Resources for
Industry
Programme
and
Support
Programme for Industrial Innovation positive,
but slow ‘multi-helix’ formation.
• NSI not yet open and ‘permeable’ enough.
• Despite some good examples, public service
innovation weak.
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The enabling environment for
NSI (III)
Recommendation 8: Systematic
efforts should
be made to bring industry and
government closer together, and to
strengthen the response of the system
to demand signals from business and
industry, on the one hand, and social
spheres, on the other. The effective
participation of the private sector
should be structured into all levels of
the system, including participation in
the NCRI.
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The enabling environment for
NSI (IV)
Recommendation 9: A concerted effort must be
made to bridge the knowledge transfer gap
between local companies (big and small) and
public sector researchers and administrators,
in order to ensure that the nation’s
considerable intellectual resources are
utilised to a much greater extent.
Recommendation 10: The research investment
climate must be improved through a review of
present and further incentive schemes for
accessibility, simplicity and effectiveness,
with broadening as required.
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The enabling environment for NSI
(V)
Recommendation 12: An explicit
Strategy should be developed for the
advancement of social innovation
within NSI.
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The Human Capital and
Infrastructure (I)
Assessment:
• Multiple systemic ‘pipeline jams’ hindering
action (or implementation)
• Massive unresolved schooling issues
• Deficits in FET, vocational training (Green
Paper)
• The achievement of an innovative and
technology-rich
economy
and
society
depends on the depth, width and overall
quality of the reservoir of human capital
The Human Capital and
Infrastructure (II)
Assessment cont.
• Despite sustained efforts to increase admission to
HE for academically deserving but financially
disadvantaged students, overall particpation rate
remains low at approximately 17 – 18%.
• Low graduation rates and drop-out rates at all levels;
• Innovation-driven economies tend to have strongly
differentiated HE system;
• Difficult to increase postgraduate enrollements;
• Disciplinary ageing due to failure to reproduce the
existing researcher cadre – next generation of
scholars.
The Human Capital and
Infrastructure (III)
In order to meet the
human
resource
development
requirements of a knowledge economy,
a planned, concerted, well-resourced
and sustained programme of action in
all areas of human capital development
should be undertaken by all the
relevant policy-makers and performers.
Recommendation 13:
The Human Capital and
Infrastructure (IV)
• Teaching at all levels should be declared an
essential public service within labour and
other legislation and relevant regulations.
• Public resourcing (both from outside and
inside institutions) should be focused on
departments or research enterprises that are
demonstratively capable of attracting and
hosting large numbers of successful
postgradautes.
• Opportunities in the academic job market
should be widened to increase the
population of productive academics.
The Human Capital and
Infrastructure (IV)
Recommendation 14: The existing infrastructure needs
not only to be expanded but restructured in terms of
its elements to ensure a higher degree of
effectiveness and efficiency in its deployment;
Recommendation 15: There is a strong case for the
establishment and step-wise rollout of an
Infrastructure Roadmap for South Africa.
Recommendation 16: Establish a National Advisory
Panel on Cyber-infrastructure to deal with cyberinfrastructure at strategic and policy level.
Monitoring and Evaluation
(I)
Assessment:
• Progress in improving the functioning of
the NSI is currently still hampered by
absence of an assigned responsibility
for ensuring the availability, collation,
maintenance (and even analysis) of the
STI indicators (quantitative and
qualitative) + M&E and planning of NSI.
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Monitoring and
Evaluation (II)
Assessment cont.
•
No entity currently
capability to do system
analysis,
building,
evaluation, learning and
for the NSI.
has the
mapping,
steerage,
foresight
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Monitoring and Evaluation (III)
ORIP should be a
centralised facility to serve as a
repository of evaluation information on
the NSI, and an expert site for its
distillation and distribution to inform
strategy and steerage at the highest
levels and more broadly.
• Attention to foresight studies, as well
as carefully designed social fabric
studies.
• Recommendation 17:
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Financing the NSI (I)
Assessment:
Comparison of the 2008–2009 R&D expenditure
data with those for 2007–2008 shows an
increase in total ‘real’ spend of only 1.3%,
while
the total number of researchers and R&D
personnel has generally been static, and
actually fell when expressed as a percentage of
the total employment in the country, to only 1.4
researchers per 1000 persons employed.
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Financing the NSI (II)
Assessment cont.
• The current incentive schemes are
laudably investing about R600 million
of government money in innovation
projects of business/industry, most of
it actually spent in HEIs and science
councils.
• The tax benefit for business R&D
activity that meets set criteria is being
taken up too slowly.
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Financing the NSI (III)
Recommendations 17, 18 and 19
• Increase public resourcing of HE R&D
(using performance as key criterion).
• Encourage
and
incentivise
business/industry to increase its R&D
expenditure
• The incentive schemes offered by the
DTI and TIA/DST should be expanded.
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Financing the NSI (IV)
Recommendation
20:
Encourage
government
departments to improve service delivery through
RDI, including the effective use of the annual survey
of government expenditure on science and
technology activities, to draw up prospective
expenditure plans annually for such activities.
Recommendation 21: Everything possible must be
done for South Africa to become the preferred
destination on the African continent for R&D-related
foreign direct investment.
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