Challenges of African Transformation: Exploring Through Innovation Approach

Preface

v Preface The South African Research Initiative (SARChI) started the research applying the innovation systems theory approach to African problems of development and structural transformation since 2008. Throughout the last four years the SARChI chair has concentrated research on innovation to address the challenges of African development. This is inspired by the vision that Africa’s bright future is better created by making it rather than predicting a destination to reach at some unknown date. The SARChI started the African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development in 2008 and have published four issues every year. It is the expectation that six issues will be published in 2013 with Taylor and Francis publishers. This has been an important outlet for emergent African researchers as nearly 70 per cent of those who publish in the journal are Africans, both in Africa and abroad. The objective is to create a publishing outlet in Africa with ISI listing. This will enable researchers to produce and publish research papers that are peer reviewed with high impact factors. The African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development are firmly on track in achieving the recognition and rating that will make it sustainable. It is one of the key milestones of the DST/NRF Research chair in innovation and development that Tshwane University was offered. The journal has a web site: www.ajstid.com This book series is another milestone which SARChI chair initiated. This volume has earned the distinction in 2012 of being the first to start the production of a series of books on the systematic application of the innovation system approach to the challenges and opportunities of accelerating and fully realising the creation of an African national innovation system. The application of systems of innovation framing and theories to African problems of development is still new. The field has been dominated by development studies. This book series offers an alternative by proposing systems of innovation approach to generate knowledge, learning and competence-building in Africa. It is with utmost responsibility we open this alternative innovation approach by warning our readers that the selection is not to transfer and apply without any alteration to embed in African economic and social change, but to find new ways of creating knowledge that will make a difference by prioritising the African reality and discovering convincing ways to understand and explain them. The innovation approach can serve two purposes; explore and demonstrate critically how the development question in Africa has been addressed hitherto. Critique is necessary, but not sufficient. What vi PREFACE the volumes do is create, by using appreciative and grounded theorising, an empirically rich exploration of the African reality in order to understand and change it. No knowledge is final. There are different ways of creating knowledge. The epistemic superiority of any new approach has to be demonstrated. The key challenge is to position the innovation approach in the African context to create new insights that inspire policy learning in order to change the African development matrix. – Mammo Muchie and Angathevar Baskaran ...