The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019

An inclusive, digitally-enabled agricultural transformation could help achieve meaningful livelihood improvements for Africa’s smallholder farmers and pastoralists. It could drive greater engagement in agriculture from women and youth and create employment opportunities along the value chain. At CTA we staked a claim on this power of digitalisation to more systematically transform agriculture early on. Digitalisation, focusing on not individual ICTs but the application of these technologies to entire value chains, is a theme that cuts across all of our work. In youth entrepreneurship, we are fostering a new breed of young ICT ‘agripreneurs’. In climate-smart agriculture multiple projects provide information that can help towards building resilience for smallholder farmers. And in women empowerment we are supporting digital platforms to drive greater inclusion for women entrepreneurs in agricultural value chains

An Exploration into Technological Capabilities among early stage Indian product based Telecom start-ups

New technology based start-ups play a very important role in developing the economy of a country. In India, telecom sector has seen unprecedented growth over the last decade and this has led to emergence of several telecom related start-ups. However, product based B2B start-ups are rare and existing ones have to undergo several challenges in commercializing. Surprisingly not much research work has been undertaken in identifying capabilities among early stage start-ups although the early phase represents a very crucial phase for product based firms and has been known to determine the success or failure for start-ups. Present study explores the technological capabilities that enable commercialization among such early stage start-ups by adopting a multiple case (four independent cases) based inductive methodology with Indian telecom start-ups as the context. We have identified architectural design, algorithmic implementation and product adaptation as components of technological capability of such start-ups. We further drill in to each of the sub-components of the technological capabilities to unearth their antecedents and peculiarities in telecom product company context. As a result we also present a classification scheme for studying the product architecture in the telecom context. We analyze and point out differences in technological capability among telecom start-ups vis-�-vis established firms in the sector .

Agile methods for agile universities

We explore a term, Agile, that is being used in various workplace settings, including the management of universities. The term may have several related but slightly different meanings. Agile is often used in the context of facilitating more creative problem-solving and advocating for the adoption, design, tailoring and continual updating of more innovative organizational processes. We consider a particular set of meanings of the term from the world of software development. Agile methods were created to address certain problems with the software development process. Many of those problems have interesting analogues in the context of universities, so a reflection on agile methods may be a useful heuristic for generating ideas for enabling universities to be more creative

Instruments of Commerce and Knowledge: Probe Microscopy, 1980-2000

Longstanding debates about the role of the university in national culture and the global economy have entered a new phase in the past decade in most industrialized, and several industrializing, countries. One important focus of this debate is corporate involvement in academic scientific research. Proponents of the academic capitalism say that corporate involvement makes the university leaner, more agile, better able to respond to the needs of the day. Critics say that corporate involvement leaves society without the independent, critical voices traditionally lodged in universities. I argue that a science and technology studies perspective, using case studies of research communities, can push this debate in directions envisioned by neither proponents nor critics. I use the development and commercialization of the scanning tunneling microscope and the atomic force microscope as an example of how research communities continually redraw the line between corporate and academic institutions.

Technology business incubators as engines of growth: towards a distinction between technology incubators and non-technology incubators

Business incubators are an increasingly popular tool for promoting job and wealth creation. Yet given the heterogeneity of incubation models, it is not always clear how incubators operate, what their main characteristics are and how can they best contribute to job and wealth creation. If technology is central in promoting economic growth and new firm creation the crucial mechanism in transferring new knowledge to markets, then technology incubators have the biggest potential to contribute to economic growth. We define technology incubators by their strategic choices in terms of mission, linkages to universities and geographical location. We investigate their nature by comparing the levels of business services provision, selection criteria, exit policy and tenants’ characteristics. Our sample includes 12 incubators located in six Northwestern European countries and a total of 101 incubated companies. Data were collected in both incubators and among their tenants. Results show that technology incubators provide more tenants with their services, select younger companies and practice stricter exit policies. Additionally, they tend to attract more experienced teams of entrepreneurs. Our main contribution is a better understanding of the technology incubators impact against the remainder population of business incubators. We speculate that incubators not focussed in incubating technology might not be contributing to company creation at all. Further, the low levels of service provision are both a product and a consequence of slack selection criteria and weak exit policies. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings to business incubator managers, policy makers and prospective tenants

Ghent University Technology Park : from a local initiative towards an essential component of the Ghent knowledge innovation ecosystem

Using the case of the Ghent University and its Technology Park, we will illustrate how changing policies and practices at the level of the university concerning research valorization have an impact on our science park. We will also demonstrate how the evolving nature of our science park has a clear impact on the university, as the science park becomes more and more an integral part of the university knowledge eco-system. We will also highlight the involvement of Ghent University in the Korea Songdo Global University Campus Project

Managing competences in entrepreneurial technology firms: a comparative institutional analysis of Germany, Sweden and the UK

Innovative firms face two major kinds of risks in developing new technologies: competence destruction and appropriability. High levels of technical uncertainty and radical changes in knowledge in some fields generate high technical failure risks and make it difficult to plan research and development programmes. They therefore encourage high levels of flexibility in acquiring and using skilled staff. Appropriability risks, on the other hand, encourage innovative firms to develop organisation-specific competences through investing in complementary assets, such as marketing and distribution capabilities, that involve longer-term employer-employee commitments to building complex organisations. These connections between technology risks and employment policies help to explain why different kinds of market economies with contrasting labour market institutions develop varied innovation patterns. This study focuses on subsectors of the computer software and biotechnology industries in three distinct Europea n countries, UK, Germany and Sweden, that vary in their level of technical change and appropriability.n/a

Researching intercultural participatory design

What impact does culture have on tools and techniques that are used to\ud facilitate cooperation amongst stakeholders in Information Communication\ud Technology (ICT) design projects? This is a question facing the ICT development\ud activities at the World Maritime University in Malmö, Sweden. At the university\ud around 300 staff and students from 90 different countries come together every\ud year. Continuously finding ways to improve how they can actively participate in\ud design activities of useful and usable ICT support to benefit their everyday work\ud is a prioritized area. This short paper presents a case that illustrates the\ud intertwined and negotiated characteristics of culture when working with tools and\ud techniques for cooperation in a student ICT design project. Using the case, an\ud ethnographically based research cycle is explored to make sense of and ultimately\ud further improve the interactions between the actors in an intercultural application\ud domain