South African researchers need to be able to think both long-term and short-term when considering the issues facing the country, Department of Science and Technology (DST) Deputy Director General: Socioeconomic Partnerships Imraan Patel affirmed on Tuesday. He was addressing the DST/Academy of Science of South Africa Stakeholders Awareness Workshop on the 2019 White Paper on Science, Technology and Innovation, held at the University of Pretoria.
He referred to President Cyril Ramaphosa's mention, in his State of the Nation address last month, to a desire to build a new "smart city" in South Africa. He noted that there had been a lot of opposition to this idea, this dream. "We in the science, technology and innovation space are allowed to dream," pointed out Patel, noting that there was potential for the country to "leapfrog" technologically,
But local researchers also had to face "basics". "We [also] need to say, what can we fix now, with short-term measures?"
However, achieving meaningful progress required a strong emphasis on partnerships and improving the coordination between different institutions and agencies. "We haven't cracked this coordination thing," he stressed. Individual institutions were doing great work, "but we lack scale". What had not yet been achieved was continuous coordination between different departments, institutions and agencies.
He accepted that achieving this coordination might require the realignment of plans and programmes. The DST was willing to do that. What was needed was to review what was working, what was not working, and what was working but had inadequate scale.
"As DST ... we want [research] consortiums. ... Linked to the fact that things are not [any longer] narrowly defined," he said, pointing out that, for example, research in the built environment now needed inputs from outside that discipline.
"We want to see a fewer number of high-impact initiatives," asserted Patel. "We [also] have to be much more deliberate about this thing called [demographic] inclusion."