An innovation analyst, Dr Abel Shagu, has urged the Federal Government to build a national innovation ecosystem where patents would be nurtured into prototypes, funded into start-ups, and scaled into consumer products.
Shagu said this during an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Monday.
According to him, this is the support system Nigerian researchers need to move their research outcomes from the shelf to the market.
He told NAN that the support gap in Nigeria was a robust commercialisation ecosystem.
According to him, universities lack strong industry linkages, funding pipelines, technology transfer offices, and government-backed innovation policies that can move patents from paper to market-ready products.
“Without these, research remains academic rather than entrepreneurial,’’ he said.
While identifying gaps in Nigeria’s research-to-market pipeline, the expert said weak technology transfer infrastructure, limited-industry-academia collaboration, funding and venture capital deficit stood out.
Others, he said, were policy and regulatory barriers, lack of tax breaks or innovation credits, entrepreneurial skills gaps and absence of incubation programs.
Shagu advised government to establish well-funded Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) in every major university nationwide, and create innovation hubs linking academia, start-ups and industry.
He said the government should also provide commercialisation grants and tax incentives to firms that adopted university patents.
He also suggested that researchers needed training on entrepreneurship and product development, as well as strengthening intellectual property enforcement to protect and encourage licensing.
“In the US, universities like MIT or Stanford have strong TTOs that manage thousands of patents and generate billions in licensing revenue.
“In Nigeria, most universities either lack TTOs or have underfunded, inactive ones so patents remain unused instead of becoming consumer products.
“In short, TTO is the commercialisation engine of a university. Without it research often ends up as a thesis on a shelf,’’ Shagu said.
(NAN)
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