In-person participants
The School of Agriculture has held its maiden hybrid guest lecture on Agri-Innovation and Technology Transfer. The guest lecturer, Dr. Danica Ramljak, a Senior Science and Innovation Consultant at the World Bank, presented on the topic, ‘Agri-Innovation and Agribusiness’.
In her opening address, Prof. Irene Susana Egyir, Dean of the School of Agriculture and Principal Investigator (PI) of the project elucidated that the aim of the guest lecture series is to provide a platform for bringing stakeholders in the agri-innovation ecosystem together for the purposes of learning and collaboration.
The PI gave an overview of Institutional Framework to Enhance Agri-innovation Ecosystem (IFEA –ECO) Project, which is funded by the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe, Kenya) under the Partnership for Skills in Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology (PASET) programme, and intimated that it is imperative for faculty, students and researchers to understand how to turn their ideas into products and commercialise them for the benefit of society and themselves. She also noted that stakeholders should be interested in knowing the process of technology transfer and intellectual property in product development.
Prof. Irene S. Egyir Dr. Danica Ramljak
(PI, IFEA-ECO) (Guest Lecturer)
In addressing the topic, Dr. Ramljak highlighted the critical role agriculture plays in the economic development of the country and the need to rethink Agri-innovation if researchers and policy makers want to make real impact in the lives of people, while accelerating economic growth. She noted that Ghana’s rank on the Global Innovation Index has for the past few years deteriorated and it behooves on researchers, innovators, policy makers and implementers to pay attention to the innovation output. She was of the view that the role of universities in technology and innovation development is very important in improving the innovation output of the country and admonished the centres of excellence to lead innovation and technology development, while government provides an enabling environment for developers and investors to protect and commercialise the various innovations and technologies they produce.
Dr. Ramljak reiterated that while it was good to increase innovation output, they should be aligned with national science and education policies. She advised that, producers of innovations should not be too quick to publish or do conference presentations, but try as much as possible to test innovations before publicising them.
As part of recommendations, Dr. Ramljak stated that the University should strive to increase scientific excellence in Agriculture, offer courses in innovation and entrepreneurship, strengthen the Technology Transfer Office (TTO) and establish internal seed grant to fund promising innovative project(s) and evaluate the University’s performance on research and development output.
This maiden guest lecture series will be held every quarter as part of the IFEA-ECO Project, hosted by the Department of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness, School of Agriculture, College of Basic and applied Sciences.
In-person participants
The event was jointly organized by the Office of Research Innovation and Development (ORID) through its Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property Services (TTIPS) team in collaboration with IFEA-ECO project and Building Stronger Universities in Developing Countries (BSU) Phase 3 project at UG.
It was well attended with participants from the Cape Coast Technical University, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research-Science and Technology Policy Research Institute (CSIR- STEPRI), Kumasi Technical University and other universities and research institutions.
