As the world tends to the task of resolving short-term sustainability challenges, companies, universities and research institutions should pursue research and development (R&D) and stimulate open innovation to find potential solutions to the longer-term challenges.

University of the Witwatersrand spatial analysis and city planning South African research chair Professor Philip Harrison told delegates at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s (CSIR’s) fifth conference, that, as research institutions started exploring the more difficult longer-term imperatives and developing foresight capability for a sustainable future, answering national and global challenges through R&D would require an open approach and the full collaboration between all stakeholders.

Currently, there was sufficient clarity on a national and global scale in terms of what the driving imperatives were to deliver a livable, sustainable environment in the short-term; however, a shift from the current closed, “secretive” approach to development, which was slowing innovation, was required for 2030 and beyond.

“There are other ways of doing things,” Harrison said, encouraging open innovation, investment in external partnerships and information-pooling to move beyond the current disaggregated forms of R&D.

“Knowledge is so widely distributed in the modern world . . . it will be the combination of internal and external models that produces real innovation,” he noted.

However, this would require an “enormous mindset change” from the instinctive “protective”, inward nature of innovating and would not occur “overnight”.

Further, he suggested a crossover in the R&D approaches of universities’ more free, experimental research style with the CSIR’s direct focus on problem solving through the unfaltering provision of tangible measurable solutions.