The concept of a pipeline of innovation, where research moves towards commercialized innovation is gaining ground in Paraguay.
Paraguay’s Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) host, INCUNA, is a business incubator inside Paraguay’s largest university, the National University of Asuncion (UNA). INCUNA is helping link together the components for an innovation ecosystem-wide approach, that will allow technologies and solutions generated inside the university to take off to market.
With support from the United States Embassy, INCUNA director, Ana Luba Yakusik, gathered dring GEW 2015 the shapers of innovation policy at the university, namely: the provost, deans of schools, the university’s Director-General for Scientific and Technological Research (DGICT) and a select sample of leading researchers. The event offered an open, candid discussion on how the university could improve its pipeline of innovations and serve as a leading example of transition from lab to market. The discussions attracted a large audience of students, mentors and professors who share a vision of an innovation-driven institution.
Currently, UNA is rather a more professionalization institution than a research institution, expressed one of the repatriated scientific investigators, Dr. Jorge Andres Molina.
Seeking to reverse the brain drain, the university has succeeded in attracting about a dozen researchers who were educated abroad to return to Paraguay and run local public labs and foster a culture of scientific innovation, like Dr. Molina. However, much needs to be done in this area since these researchers are still earn low salaries and face a lack of cultural and institutional support.
Reflecting this reality is the fact that research and development is a very small percentage (5 percent) of the total budget Congress approves for the largest education institution in the nation.
As a nation, Paraguay invests 0.085 percent of its GDP on research and development, according to the latest data from the National Science and Technology Council (CONACYT). International organizations have recommended a minimum spending of 1 percent of the national wealth in research and development, which encompasses basic research, applied research and experimental development.
The challenge at UNA, in particular, becomes more explicit when considering that its small research and development budget gets distributed among its 643 researchers across 80 professions, a ratio of investigators per career that is already considered dismally low.
The Provost Office reports that each year it finances approximately 50 research projects through a $100,000 (USD) total investment. That is only an average of $2,000 (USD) per research project, on an annual basis – which means that UNA’s researchers must devote much time to finding outside resources. Dr. Inocencia Peralta, Director-General for Scientific and Technological Research (DGICT) said the university loses much fought-for talent to private research institutes due to budget constraints.
Patricia Stanley, director of the National Directorate for Intellectual Property (DINAPI), pointed out at the GEW event that UNA’s incentives for its researchers should not only focus on their number of publications in journals. but also on patents generated. This will give them the opportunity for the University and its professionals to obtain greater funds for further research and development activity through patent royalties.
In Stanley’s opinion, the low level of patent activity inside UNA is a result of a generalized lack of knowledge of ways to access intellectual property protection.
“IP is still an esoteric area for Paraguayan inventors,” she said.
Across the nation, there is an information gap that prevents more people to think in terms of IP protection as they develop their creative and scientific activities. As a result, the country received only 11 patents applications over the course of 2015.
Links to industry is another missing component for new technologies to reach the market. The team of industrial design students behind an electric car developed at the private Catholic University of Asuncion (UCA) is currently seeking industry partners willing to mass produce this low-cost, environmentally-friendly vehicle known as the Quantum car. Even inside private universities, which should have more and better links with the private sector, students and researchers lack institution-wide support mechanisms for developing marketable innovations.
The recent interviews with the Quantum creators also highlight two mayor gaps in Paraguay’s innovation system: the scarcity of mentors and the lack of sources of risk capital.
Fortunately, like other young entrepreneurial minds, Paraguayan startup entrepreneurs see no borders. For example, the 3D print hand-prosthetics social innovator “Po” (hand in Paraguay’s native language, Guarani) just launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds through the global crowd.
The challenges to link the actors necessary to innovate are many, but if the energy for innovation felt during GEW 2015 is any indication, Paraguay has a critical mass of forward-thinking leaders willing to collaborate to move the country’s creative work down the innovation pipeline.
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