SA innovators get funding access

Cape Town - 120224 - DIGITALLY STICHED PANORAMA - The City of Cape Town is unhappy with the grand Parade vendors and wants to get rid of them. The City also wants to do away with the public parking available at the Parade. Reporter: Bronwynne Jooste Picture: David Ritchie

Cape Town - 120224 - DIGITALLY STICHED PANORAMA - The City of Cape Town is unhappy with the grand Parade vendors and wants to get rid of them. The City also wants to do away with the public parking available at the Parade. Reporter: Bronwynne Jooste Picture: David Ritchie

Published Sep 8, 2015

Share

Cape Town - The South African Innovation Summit on Tuesday announced an arrangement that would give inventors and innovators who presented their ideas at the conference in Cape Town last month access to a new global innovation exchange and more than $214 million in funding before the exchange’s global public launch.

Dr Audrey Verhaeghe, chairman of the SA Innovation Summit, on Tuesday announced the partnership with the Global Innovation Exchange, a new Washington DC-based global clearinghouse for innovation that will provide a platform to highlight innovative solutions and businesses, and help innovators access funding, resources and customers.

Dr Verhaeghe told ANA: “The South African Innovation Summit is pleased to be working with some of the world’s top innovation funders through the exchange.”

Hooking African innovators into a global exchange will go some way to alleviating Dr Verhaeghe’s concern that Africans are missing out on the benefits of Open Innovation, a global movement around sharing ideas, challenges, problems and solutions that was already “a hot topic” in Europe and America. She described Open Innovation as anything on a continuum from Linux, the open source computer operating system, on one side to contractual, IP-driven deals that allow companies to leverage solutions created outside their own business.

She said she would be sending the good news about the special arrangement with the Global Innovation Exchange to summit attendees in an email on Tuesday. She would be telling them: “You will also be able to highlight the type of support you might need and connect with experts around the world who may be able to assist you.”

A presentation from USAid, one of the exchange’s lead backers, describes the Innovation Exchange as a web-based innovation marketplace that will promote, test and grow innovations to address humanity’s greatest challenges, a platform to connect innovation demand to innovation supply, and a non-branded, open-source website available to anyone working on innovation that can impact humanity’s greatest challenges.

Such has been the interest in the exchange before it is officially launched that 661 innovations are already queuing for inclusion as well as $214 million dollars listed as available for development funding for innovations. Expect a flurry of activity from Africa starting as soon as Verhaeghe presses send and those logins and passwords start landing in inboxes of summit attendees.

Alexis Bonnell, head of applied innovation and acceleration at USAid’s global development lab, told ANA: “We are particularly interested in using it to allow innovators and entrepreneurs in Africa to highlight their solutions for major challenges facing the region.”

ANA

Related Topics: