National Advisory Council on Innovation Reports

The Council’s tenure was shaped by a combination of external and internal forces and drivers affecting the National System of Innovation (NSI). The Covid-19 pandemic has been catastrophic, contributing to deepening social, economic and environmental crises. At the same time, public awareness and appreciation of the role of STI has grown. The NSI still has to analyse the longterm effects of Covid-19 and develop measures to mitigate future pandemics.The NSI has been undergoing policy review and renewal. NACI has played a critical role in this regard, conducting reviews of major policies and a foresight exercise to inform the new White Paper on STI and the STI decadal plan.The Council contributed to monitoring and evaluating the performance of the NSI, publishing the STI Indicators Report annually. The launch of this flagship report has become a constant feature in the calendar of NSI actors.The STI Indicators Report serves various purposes for various stakeholders. NACI has not yet conducted a study to examine its utilisation, but there are indications that policymakers use it to inform policy and improve performance. Researchers and students use it for research and study purposes, and international partners use it to improve their knowledge and understanding of the NSI as well as to strengthen bilateral engagements. The section below provides a summary of the Council’s contribution and interventions.

Gender equality is one of the core ideals preserved in the Bill of Rights of the South African Constitution (1993). The government has, therefore, adopted the approach of ‘mainstreaming gender’ in order to respond to gender inequalities. To do that, the government has established ‘gender desks’ or ‘gender focal points’ within each government department, whose responsibility is to ensure the integration of a gender perspective into all policy and implementation activities.The government has also developed policy and legislation that tagged women as a specific group e.g. Employment Equity legislation. A strong feature of the focus on women and gender is the emphasis on the under-representation of women in the science and technology human resource base. For example, one of the key weaknesses in the existing science and technology system identified in the Research & Development (R&D) Strategy (2002) is the “frozen demographics” of the human resource base. The R&D Strategy notes that the scientific workforce in South Africa is shrinking and growing older insofar as “black and women scientists, technologists and engineers are not entering the academic publishing ranks and that the key research infrastructure is composed of people who will soon retire.” Furthermore, women tend to publish considerably less than their male counterparts, with the publication outputs of women in the 1990s comprising about one fifth of the total.  As part of a number of interventions suggested by the National Plan and R&D Strategy to address gender equity challenges, the establishment of the South African Reference Group [SARG] of Women in Science, Engineering and Technology (currently known as the Science, Engineering and Technology for Women [SET4W]) sub-committee ..

This publication is part of our contribution to building the monitoring, evaluation and learning capability necessary for assessing the health of the National System of Innovation (NSI). Compared to previous publications, the 2015 South African STI Indicators report focuses more on international comparisons against which South Africa can benchmark its progress in innovation. Comparisons are made with countries such as Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the United States and the BRIC group of countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). This benchmarking exercise aims to stimulate debate and identify issues that need to be addressed for South Africa to be a knowledge driven economy. Other new aspects in this 2015 publication include indicators of South African universities’ performance in knowledge generation, inter-sectoral research collaboration and co-authorships and research prioritisation.It is important to note that although there have been improvements, South Africa still experiences STI data related challenges. In an attempt to address some of these challenges, or initiatives such as the development of an Innovation Scorecard for South Africa and the development of a National Science, Technology and Innovation Information Portal. 

The purpose of the project reported here is twofold: 1) to assess how community and regional innovation systems have been responding to societal challenges confronting rural South Africans, and 2) to evaluate how the two systems are aligned with each other for increased societal impact. The specific objectives of the study were to:Investigate if community and regional innovation systems exist in South Africa;Explore how such systems respond to both economic and societal challenges;andEstablish if there are linkages between the different systems with the aim ofencouraging active participation by local rural communities. 

This publication is part of our contribution to building the monitoring, evaluationand learning capability necessary for assessing the health of the National System ofInnovation (NSI). The 2016 STI indicators report is based on the analysis of NSI performance during the period between 1996 and 2016. Coincidentally, government is leading a process of reviewing the current 1996 White Paper on Science and Technology and developing the new White Paper on Science Technology and Innovation (STI). Therefore, the 2016 STI indicators report can provide necessary input into the current policy development process.The 2016 STI indicators report identifies areas of progress but also points to the lack of progress in certain areas of the NSI. First, the NSI human capital pipeline remainsconstrained. The percentage of matric learners who passed mathematics and physical science with at least 50% remains low. The proportion of matric female learners passing mathematics and physics with at least 60% has been declining from 2008 to 2016.Unsurprisingly then, the undergraduate percentage SET enrolment has remained stagnant between 2005 (29.4%) and 2015 (29.7%). Notwithstanding, at the postgraduate level, the proportion of science engineering and technology (SET) enrolment as percentage of total student enrolments has increased between 2005 and 2015. 

In developing this publication, NACI draws from the 2002 National R&D Strategy (indicators logic model framework) which specifically identified indicators for an assessment of the health of the national system of innovation (NSI) and the tracking thereof over time as a basis for performance measurement.The recently publishedMinisterial Review Report requires a strong evidence based and data driven approach in assessing the NSI. Therefore progress in improving the functioning of the NSI depends on the availability, collation, maintenance (and even analysis) of both quantitative and qualitative STI indicators.This repor t is aimed at providing core South African science, technology and innovation indicators with a view to assessing the performance of the NSI and includes extensive data obtained from a wide spectrum of local and international data sources. Data included in this publication mostly cover the past ten years(2004 – 2013) in order to allow for a proper trend analysis over a period of time.Each year we strive to improve this publication so that it may continue to be more useful. In the last financial year (2013/14) NACI under took a study that identified gaps in available indicators used in the assessment of the NSI. Some of the new indicators identified in this study are innovation networks, foreign direct investment networks and higher education system resources. In response to this study and taking into consideration the STI policy landscape the following are some of the new indicators included in this publication: 1) Dinaledi Schools data; 2) Matriculation data for Physical Science; 3) data on different types of scientific publications; 4) information on knowledge networks, ..