Blog Post

By Natalie Chodoriwsky The Government of Canada’s 2019 Intellectual Property Strategy has committed to “conducting IP awareness and use survey to identify how Canadians understand and...

By Chidi Oguamanam The third industrial revolution (3IR) provided perhaps the most significant insights into Africa’s potential to fast-track its sustainable development. As with previous industrial revolutions,...

Khadiga Hassan The Department of Science and Innovation and the South African National Research Foundation (DSI/NRF) Trilateral Chair in Transformative Innovation, the 4IR and Sustainable...

By Larry Onyango Covid-19 has not just altered everyday life but has also upended modes of doing research. This especially applies to qualitative research that...

Our Open AIR researcher Dr. Erika Kraemer-Mbula is continuing her exciting research in South Africa about informal sector entrepreneurs. Informal entrepreneurship is receiving increasing scholarly and political attention in Africa. The continent’s booming youth population calls for an unprecedented need to create income and livelihood opportunities. Besides the traditional focus on formalisation, there is a growing interest in understanding the creative processes and innovations occurring in informal enterprises. However, evidence remains scarce, and research on informal enterprises still represents a relatively new and unexplored frontier.

The Open AIR network seeks to bring, among other things, a gendered perspective to our research. We are exploring the nexus between feminist literature, intellectual property, information technology, and innovation; connecting these approaches into the network’s future priorities.

By Esther Ekong As part of its Solutions for Gender Equality speaker series, The International Development Research Centre (IDRC), hosted a special panel...

By Nicole Tumaine Over the past four months, I have had the privilege of attending three international conferences as a panelist thanks to the generous...

By Kgopotso Ditshego Magoro COVID-19 has exposed that, while the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) evangelists are preaching that we are experiencing a revolution, for many...

In my previous blog on skills development and innovation at Ghana’s Suame Magazine, I showed how the high level of collaboration and sharing of knowledge and skills within the cluster is contributing to innovation. Further, I provided some preliminary findings on the inability of these artisans’ to keep pace with the changing technology landscape. I also found that few artisans expressed interest in joining or maintaining a membership with local trade associations due to these associations’ inability to implement their key mandate of skills development and facilitation of business for members and firms.