Let’s partner to commercialise research: Prof. Dickson appeals to industries
The Vice-Chancellor of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Prof. Rita Akosua Dickson, has appealed to industries to partner with the university to commercialise some of its research works.
She said the university had, over the years, come out with innovations to solve problems facing society and brought relief to people.
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However, she said industries were making good use of those researches and pleaded for more collaboration from the private sector to help bring those innovations out to the public.
Exhibition
Prof. Dickson made the appeal during the opening ceremony of a four-day science exhibition mounted by the university as part of activities marking the 70th-anniversary celebration of the KNUST.
The 70th-anniversary celebration is on the theme: “KNUST: 70 years of global impact; a new age for a renewed focus.”
As a science and technology university, she said the objective was to make an impact in society and “of 70 years of our existence, that is what we have stood for.
“What keeps us awake till now is that we tell our story on a consistent basis that the problems of society are our problems and we go through research to proffer solutions to the problems of humanity,” she explained.
It is in this vein that she said there was the need for the industry to partner with the university such that, “if we carry out these researches, we must ensure that the research or the outcome of these researches are impacting the people for whom the researches are carried out”.
Appreciation
She expressed appreciation to the industries that offered their platforms to the students of the university to undertake their industrial attachment, saying, “they help us to bring the practicality of the training of our students to bear on what we do and we want to say we are grateful to them and we welcome them to even help us to commercialise all these research outcomes.
“They should come and take it up so that it will be very beneficial to society. In that sense, then, we will be satisfied and know that, indeed, our core mandate of impacting the lives of humanities, we are taking that course,” she pleaded.
Planning committee chairman
The chairman of the 70th-anniversary planning committee of the university, Prof. William O. Ellis, said the exhibition was a platform for KNUST to showcase some of its works, innovations and creativity to its stakeholders and the rest of the Ghanaian community.
He said it would also open the university and its facility to the general public, “allowing for a better appreciation of the strength of growth and what the university stands for.”
According to him, “KNUST is Ghana and Ghana is KNUST. This means that one cannot extricate the development of our dear country from or without KNUST.”
Prof. Ellis said the science and technology exhibition “is just a small aspect of what we do here as a university.”
The exhibition was mounted by the colleges of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Health Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences, Art and Built Environment, Science and the Institute of Distance Learning.