Higher Education, Science and Innovation Minister, Dr Blade Nzimande launched a new fund on Monday to help empower innovators and tech entrepreneurs in South Africa.
The fund is an initiative that was created by the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
“Our vision is to grow the Higher Education Innovation Fund to R1billion and we are also inviting private sector companies and other funding institutions to come on board and help us achieve this objective,” Minister Nzimande said.
The fund aims to help students that are coming out of technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges and universities and who are moving towards becoming tech entrepreneurs.
The fund will be used to create programmes that help general entrepreneurship, ideation, and design thinking, Nzimande said.
The minister said at the launch in Pretoria that stakeholders aim to fill the gaps in the current set of tools and programmes available to support innovation and technology entrepreneurship nationwide.
“This will be done through, among others, supporting business model development, validation and development of tech-entrepreneurship, support commercialisation, market access and intellectual property protection, and supporting scale-up and investor readiness,” he explained.
He called for an innovation-entrepreneurship ecosystem that is well-coordinated, integrated and responsive.
This ecosystem should be in place to help student innovators and future tech-entrepreneurs in their journey.
Government is said to also be in the process of looking at ways to sufficiently fund this entrepreneurship ecosystem.
In addition, the fund also aims to train and up-skill student tech entrepreneurs, who are capable of developing and commercialising competitive innovative products, and to support the establishment and management of sustainable tech-enterprises.
IOL News has reached out to the department for further clarity on the fund and what oversight measures there will be place to avoid misappropriation of funds on all sides. This is a developing story.
IOL BUSINESS