A Process Model for University-Industry Cooperation in Sub-Saharan Africa : Lessons From Lesotho

The ability of a typical university to engage in academic entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is constrained not only by lack of strong internal resources, but also by poor absorptive capacity of the industries and absence of enabling intermediary institutions. However, an SSA university can still develop university-industry relationships by taking a development path that begins at the inception stage, where the university is prepared to put aside seed funding for research and commercialisation from its meager resources. The focus of such research should be on strategic projects that will deliver demonstrable artifacts within a reasonable time frame to incite the interest of medium scale entrepreneurs, who are neither too small to be unable to fund further research nor too big to develop an "I can do without you" attitude. Furthermore, issues around technology transfer offices and intellectual property can evolve with the process from inception to maturity stages.