Models for technology research collaboration between industry and academia in South Africa

An essential component of an active knowledge economy, is successful research and development (R&D) collaboration between entities in the private and public sector. This is particularly important in technology research, especially with software technologies where research results need to rapidly move into the market to have any chance of uptake in a normally shorter commercial window of opportunity. The Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Act of 2008 (the IPR Act) seeks to provide measures to more effectively use intellectual property (IP) generated in whole or in part by the use of public funds. However, the requirements of the IPR Act have placed additional constraints on structuring industry collaboration with public research institutions. In particular, the Act requires that, should an industry partner wish to take ownership of IP generated at a public research institution, it should fund the research on a full cost basis, contribute materially to the development of the IP, or face a complicated and still mostly untested bureaucratic process of seeking assignment of IP. In this research paper, we consider a number of case studies of industry-academic research collaboration projects in South Africa undertaken within the context of the new IPR Act. We highlight certain benefits and detractions of each model, revealing practical implications and sometimes limitations of each.