Johannesburg - Trade and industry minister Rob Davies on Friday relaunched government’s Support Programme for Industrial Innovation (SPII).
The launch took place at the Innovation Summit held in Cape Town. SPII was designed to promote technology development in South Africa’s industry by providing financial assistance for the development of innovative products and/or processes.
The programme, according to minister of Small Business Development, Lindiwe Zulu, approved 28 projects in the 2013/14 financial year. This amounted to R76 million with beneficiaries coming from Gauteng, Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, she said. Areas of focus include the green economy, ICT, energy, manufacturing as well as manufacturing. July budget vote ,
However, a March 2014 report by Genesis, investigating the impact of the programme between 2000 and 2013 found only 53% of SPII matching scheme projects were commercialised during the 13-year period.
Despite this success rate, the survey also showed 47% of respondents who received SPII support said that they could not have continued without SPII funding, while 57% of rejected applicants reported to not have continued with their project.
The survey results suggest that on average, both accepted and rejected SPII projects create jobs, although it was not possible to attribute permanent jobs to those who enjoyed funding.
Davies notes the SPII has since been transferred from the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) to be administered by the Incentive Development and Administration Division (IDIAD) at the department.
“The intention of SPII is to promote the development of technologically innovative products or processes that are commercially viable and internationally competitive thus rendering the SA Industry to be competitive. Our biggest challenge is to get these industrial innovations to be commercial products,” said Davies.
With SPII, the department will be able to assist in developing the entrepreneurial mind-set and functional skill-sets to enable innovators to create and launch their technology ventures, said Davies. He added the programme was based on a matching grant principle which has succeeded in leveraging funding from the private sector, increasing investment in technology development, diffusion and commercialisation.
“The programme is divided into three support schemes, namely the Product Process Development (PPD) scheme which is a non-repayable grant focusing on small, micro and medium enterprises and capped at maximum R2 million. There is also the Matching Scheme which provides a non-taxable, non-repayable grant of between 50% and 75% of qualifying costs and capped at R5 million, as well as the conditionally repayable Partnership Scheme which is a non-taxable and conditionally repayable grant of 50% of qualifying costs with a minimum grant R10 000 000,” he explained.
The department will collaborate with other relevant departments to support innovation.
IOL