Report Summary

Period: 2014-2021

Partner: Open African Innovation Research (Open AIR)

The Open African Innovation Research (Open AIR) Partnership is a Pan-African research project involving Strathmore University along with four other leading universities – the University of Ottawa in Canada, the University of Cape Town in South Africa, the Nigerian Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, and the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Open AIR’s primary goal is to uncover new insights to ease tensions between IP and access to knowledge.
Open AIR was then focused on three priority research themes. The first explored the nuances of innovation at high technology hubs, explaining how and why new businesses were likely to succeed or fail across Africa and in Canada. The second research theme, which dovetails with the first, was informal sector entrepreneurship, where resilience and innovative practices are often attributed to a shared spirit of openness and collaboration. Finally, the network was researching and collaborating with indigenous communities, which have a long history of collaborative knowledge production. In all of those areas, Open AIR was working to create new and improved intellectual property policies, performance metrics and management practices. We are the East Africa hub for Open AIR and the research lead for the high technology hubs theme.

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