Events

Researchers from the Open African Innovation Research (Open AIR) network have been awarded almost CAD 750,000 for a new three-year research project, Catalyzing AI’s Potential in Africa...

Open AIR’s North African hub, The Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) at the American University in Cairo’s Onsi Sawiris School of Business,...

By Jeremy de Beer and Yvonne Ndelle The recent conference hosted by the Canada Africa Parliamentary Association (CAAF) served as a pivotal platform for discussing...

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...

Le Réseau Open AIR est heureux d’annoncer un appel à soumissions pour un atelier international et une publication sur le thème de la régulation...

When SSHRC and IDRC awarded sizeable, prestigious grants to support Open AIR in its third phase of research, the Network’s leadership promptly organized a face-to-face meeting at its North African Hub, the American University of Cairo. While a great strength of Open AIR is its ability to coordinate its research and administrative tasks remotely across its various hubs, personal meetings are invaluable when the Network needs to deal with specific overarching strategic issues.

Last month, Open AIR launched our inaugural case study workshop at the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology (CIPIT), part of Strathmore University’s Law School in Kenya, and one of Open AIR’s hubs. The workshop sought to provide successful case study participants with an opportunity to present their proposals and brainstorm with their colleagues.

By Meghan Blom Open AIR aims to understand how open collaborative innovation can help businesses scale up and seize the opportunities of the global knowledge economy....

Earlier this year, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) held a two-day workshop on “Supporting Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Use the Intellectual Property System in Their Competitive Strategy” at the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology in Cairo, Egypt, which some of our Open AIR NERG members attended. The goal of this meeting was to discuss how to encourage young innovators to protect their inventions by patenting them at the Egyptian Patent Office. The workshop had vibrant and sometimes heated discussions between these innovators and government officials regarding many of the obstacles faced in the patenting process in Egypt.

In the first week of April 2016, the Open African Innovation Research and Training (Open AIR) network held a three-day workshop at our Nairobi hub, Strathmore University. The workshop included the Open AIR team and was primarily organized to bring together all the successful case study researchers in order to review, refine, and brainstorm about their upcoming research. There was also significant activity on Twitter, which can be read about here. All the case studies that Open AIR is funding fall under at least one of our major research themes: high technology hubs, informal sector innovation, indigenous entrepreneurship, and metrics and policies.