The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has said that academic research from Nigerians will soon be translated into commercial purposes for the benefit of all.
The Executive Secretary, Sonny Echono, said this during a tour to Innov8 Hub for the TETFund Alliance for Innovative Research (TETFAIR) Prototype Development Bootcamp in Abuja on Thursday.
The Innov8 Hub is a creative space where ideas are conceptualised and transformed to development.
At the Innov8 Hub, aspiring inventors, researchers and academics are trained and developed to navigate through the Nigerian innovation and invention ecosystems.
Echono said the hub serves as an opportunity to make a difference in the life of people as well as transform the fortune of the country both intellectually and materially.
According to him, of all the gifts God has given mankind; it is the intellect that will make the most impact, hence the need to invest in researchers.
”A lot of what is happening in this hub is agriculture and Nigeria has a comparative advantage in agriculture.
” With dedication, commitment and the right policies, we can be able to move into that agricultural space to help our people.
”At the Fund, we are doing a lot of intervention in innovation space this year. We want to replicate the hub in our tertiary institutions.
”The only challenge we have is the incubation, guidance and exposure to what is happening in the other climes but we will continue to partner on training our researchers,” he said.
He also promised to bring researchers from the polytechnics and Colleges of Education (COE) to the hub for their skills to be enhanced as researchers from universities had benefited in the past.
He, therefore, said that entrepreneurial programme similar to what is obtainable at the hub will be replicated in various institutions to teach the young students.
Meanwhile, Neta Hanin, Programme Director, Innov8, said the hub was created to enable and equip researchers in the nation’s institutions to transform their research-based ideas into real commercialised solutions.
Hanin said that doing this would impact the society as well as impact the way researchers teach and implement knowledge and transparency to their students.
”TETFAIR is a year-long programme, which started its first bootcamp from December 2022 to January 2023.
”We focused on equipping the participants with all the knowledge and methodologies they need to be familiar with for the year long journey, which we are using during the process of the product development and technology development.
”So we went through classes that were about ideation problem, the finishing, business development, market analysis, market research, and also we learned about all the proper process of product, product development and technology development,” she said.
She added that the hub had been able to produce 16 teams, comprising 57 participants now developing prototypes of their innovations.
Prof. Ayotunde Adebambo from the Department of Animal Breeding and Genetic, Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, called for support to enable researchers get value added and market solutions for their researches.
