Midlands State University’s innovators division seeks to promote young entrepreneurs

By Caleb Chikwawawa

The Midlands State University (MSU) has made strides to promote young innovators and entrepreneurs through a division aimed at uplifting start-up works by the demographic group.

Presenting at the Innovation Week Zimbabwe Launch which was hosted by the Ministry of Information Communication Technology Postal and Courier Services in Harare recently, Dr Winmore Kusena, the Research Manager in the MSU Research and Innovation Division, said the division was dedicated to supporting innovators.

“So at MSU, we have a division that is dedicated to support, just to support. We have the research unit responsible for scouting, looking for ideas, potential innovation ideas and then we translate all those into commercial enterprises,” Dr Kusena said.

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“Our ecosystem starts from the research. Our research is done by the students and communities as well, our doors are open. If you have passed through MSU, you are still welcome to come back and join the team. Even if you haven’t been to MSU and you have an idea, our doors are open.”

Dr Kusena said the division was segmented into a research and innovations unit, adding that innovation and invention were different.

“We think an innovation is an invention, when in actual fact, what you simply need is an improvement sometimes to what is in existence and that is what we believe in,” he said.

“We take you through all that, the innovation space and coming to the start-up, the ICT start-ups.

“Our structure as a division when it comes to supporting our innovators, we actually have a wing that is dedicated to ICT and there we have an ICT innovation leader, and we have technical people from faculties,” said Dr Kusena.

He added, “As a University, most of our operations are run through committees. What we do is when you have a research idea, you go through this whole publications and then there are people who are responsible for identifying Innovation potential from your research because what we are simply exploiting here is intellectual property and for so many years, universities were like grave yards where you have a lot of information, intellect, but it would just end there.

“It is only now, relatively new though we have really taken strides towards the achievement of the goal. We are saying let’s exploit the IP. We have several strategies that we then get to exploit the IP that you would have come up with as a team.

“We have innovators, sometimes we have what we call enablers because you can have an idea but you don’t really know how best to go about it. You don’t necessarily want the expert who is coming in to assist you to become a co-innovator with you, so we have a term for such so that your idea, your innovation will get to a point of fruition.

“Failure to have such support structure, you will continue to have your idea in your mind, maybe on your paper, maybe in your Ipad and it ends there.

“As Midlands State University, we have quite a number of start-ups especially in the ICT and these are young innovators. Some of them are still students, but they are directors for their own companies.

“We have some of them as start-ups. We have some of our innovations, turning into spinoffs.

“You may have an idea, and it is protected, we seek to make sure that it is protected. We have an office that is responsible for that.

“You then get to choose after advice and a lot of information from experts to say, ‘when it comes to my innovation, this is how I would want to exploit it’.

“It could be that you are a full time student or a full time employee and you are not interested in the day-to-day running of your business. That is when we say let’s go through the spinoff route where everything else the university is running for you and you get your Monday,” said Kusena.