Sixty per cent of South African universities reported that they were not empowered to commercialise their Intellectual Property (IP) through spinoffs, start-ups or incubators. This was the finding of a survey conducted by the National Intellectual Property Management Office (NIPMO) which sits in the Department of Science and Technology and deals with publicly funded research and development (R&D) IP.
Dr Elmary Buis (left), NIPMO Deputy Director: Regulatory and Compliance was speaking virtually to a public universities’ executive leadership audience at the two-day Executive Leadership Workshop (ELW) that was hosted by Universities South Africa’s Entrepreneurship Development in Higher Education (EDHE) programme in Cape Town, this week. The ELW 2022 theme was Commercialisation of Research.