University Students Urged to Turn Innovations Into Businesses

Soroti University students have been urged to protect their intellectual property and commercialise their academic projects to create jobs and generate income instead of relying solely on formal employment after graduation.

The call was made during an engagement organised by the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance in partnership with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), where final-year students were encouraged to turn their research projects, software applications, designs, books, music and other innovations into marketable products.

The initiative seeks to help students identify innovations with commercial potential, protect them through intellectual property (IP) systems and develop businesses that can employ other young people.

Shirley Gladys Nakyejwe, a Senior IT Officer in the Department of Research and Development at the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance, said the ministry was raising awareness among students about how intellectual property protection could help them benefit financially from their innovations.

She said Uganda’s national intellectual property policy provided a framework for safeguarding innovations, which the ministry was adapting to address the needs of the information and communications technology sector.

“Our mandate is developing the digital transformation landscape within the country. We customise it and we are disseminating to the students across the country. We break it down so that they understand what it means to them, how they can use it and, when they develop solutions, how best they can have their copyrights safeguarded,” Nakyejwe said.

She said the ministry had brought together experts from different institutions to help students transform their innovations into prototypes and commercially viable products that could compete in local and international markets.

Nakyejwe said many university students completed research projects to fulfil graduation requirements but abandoned the findings after leaving university, even when the projects addressed practical problems in their communities.

“In the past, we have had students come out of the university. A requirement for you to graduate is a project, and during this project students go out to identify business or community challenges and they come up with the solution. But at the end of the university programme, they leave the research and everything they have come up with in the library and move on with their lives to the streets looking for jobs,” she said.

“What we are saying is that the research at the library shouldn’t end at the library shelves, but you can go out with it into the marketplace, come up with your own company with your solution and employ other young people within the ecosystem,” Nakyejwe added.

She said commercializing student innovations could help address unemployment by enabling graduates to establish businesses and create jobs for others.

“At the end of the engagement with the young people here, we aim to identify the solutions that we can introduce to the marketplace,” she said.

Nakyejwe also challenged students to develop innovations using locally available resources, arguing that communities could create competitive products by improving how raw materials are processed and used. She cited the availability of oranges in the Teso sub-region, saying students could explore opportunities to develop locally manufactured skincare products instead of relying on imported alternatives.

“Within Teso there are very many oranges, yet most of the solutions used for making skincare products for men and women are foreign. But what the foreign guys do, they come here, get the raw material and improve on the processing. Since we have the quality and the raw products, can we improve on our own instead of importing?” she asked.

Amos Mpuga, the Acting Commissioner for E-Services, said government, in partnership with other stakeholders, had established innovation hubs at five universities to promote entrepreneurship and support students to develop solutions to community challenges.

The universities are Soroti, Busitema, Kabale, Muni and Gulu.

Mpuga said the hubs were intended to provide an environment where students could develop useful applications and other innovations, but noted that many had yet to learn how to use intellectual property systems to generate income from their work.

Shimpei Watanabe, an expert on the ICT Industry Promotion Project working with the ministry and JICA, said intellectual property protection was essential for innovators seeking to commercialise their products.

“As JICA, we are supporting innovators in Uganda. We are providing training, mentoring programmes and acceleration programmes so that the students can produce a good service. If they do not have the IP, this good service cannot be protected,” Watanabe said.

He said similar initiatives were being undertaken in Japan to help young people understand innovation and benefit economically from their ideas.

Watanabe added that the project in Uganda was focusing on innovations that could transform communities.

Dr Excellence Favor, a senior lecturer and Deputy Dean of the School of Engineering and Technology at Soroti University, said the institution would encourage researchers and student innovators to identify their intellectual property, document it, clarify ownership and benefit-sharing arrangements, and seek appropriate protection before publicly disclosing their innovations.

She warned that innovators risked losing commercial opportunities when they disclosed their ideas before taking appropriate steps to protect them.

“We sometimes get excited to talk about our ideas, and before you know it, you have given the whole formula. Before you know it, it’s already out there, and the person who has more resources picks it and goes ahead of you to implement it while the owner of the idea is still struggling,” Favor said.

She said the university intended to integrate intellectual property awareness into research supervision, innovation projects and entrepreneurship training.

Favor added that the institution would engage chief executives, industries and other organisations to identify challenges that students could help solve through research and innovation.

“We shall organise a function where we attract the CEOs, industries and institutions and ask them what problems they have, and whether we can contribute and solve the problem with you,” she said.

By URN

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