Ideas factory – an Innovators’ Dream

Addis Ababa, 11 March 2008 (ECA) – Scientists do not usually participate in competitive sports, but imagine for a second, an Olympics for African scientists and researchers, showing off their prowess and demonstrating recent achievements in a competitive, albeit friendly atmosphere – not in a stadium, but in labs, equipped with whatever it takes to produce scalable results.

Celebrating African achievements in science through various types of competitive ideas was the objective behind the ideas factory session facilitated by Brainstore, a Swiss company dedicated to cutting out bureaucratic and lengthy hurdles to get research ideas implemented.

Out of several hundred proposals submitted by science and research enthusiasts, for the Science with Africa Conference, held on 3-7 March 2008, twenty were processed by Brainstore’s “industrial idea production process”, designed to stimulate innovative and lateral thinking through concepts such as, “idea boosting, compression, decision, management and implementation support”.

Brainstore, a co-sponsor of the Conference set out to assess submissions based on the main key challenges emerging from the discussions, including limited infrastructure capacities and resources, weak interaction between African scientists and researchers with the global scientific community and other stakeholders; and inadequate representation of African scientists in international research projects. Selected projects would demonstrate usability, practicability and commercialization of the results.

The highlight of 3 days of taking through submissions through Brainstore’s industrial thinking machine was an interactive and participatory plenary, where selected ideas were rated by participants, while Brainstore staff calibrated the results in as “realtime” format as possible. Ideas ranged from setting up open labs in universities and making them available to scientists to test new ideas for a small fee to providing one science kit per school, equipping primary schools with first-rate kits to boost science education. The science kit per school idea proved to be the most popular.

Others, no less popular but a little more eclectic included adding an R&D fee to luxury goods to beef up African investment in research, which currently stands at less than 1% of most countries’ GDP; Making local African knowledge available in rural communities, such as in traditional medicines patentable with special loans.

The next stage will entail working with partners, including the UN Economic Commission for Africa to see to it that these ideas are funded and implemented in the coming months.

For the raw material on all the compressed ideas, go to www.uneca.org/sciencewithafrica

For more on the work of Brainstore: www.brainstore.com