Education

KNUST vice chancellor to industries: Commercialise academia research

Professor Rita Akosua Dickson said the desire to promote sustainability should be beyond research and stakeholder engagement

The Vice Chancellor of KNUST, Professor Rita Akosua Dickson has urged policy makers and stakeholders in the supply chain industry to help commercialise research outputs from the academia to achieve the desired outcome from research findings.

According to her, the desire to promote sustainability should be beyond research and stakeholder engagement, rather it should be geared towards ensuring that research findings impact society.

“Strengthening supply chain and supply networks through CARISCA’s research and innovation can be most fruitful, and sustainable if efforts are made to commercialise the research outputs.

“It will be a failure if outputs from the over 100 students assessing scholarship opportunities from CARISCA are kept on the shelves,” she said

The Provost of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor Charles Marfo was speaking on behalf of the Vice Chancellor at the launch of the second annual supply chain summit organised by the Center for Applied Research and Innovation in Supply Chain – Africa (CARISCA) held at the School of Business at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

The CARISCA supply chain summit, held on 28 June 2022, under the theme, “How Africa Matters to the Global Supply Chain” had supply chain researchers and practitioners present on topics and emerging issues in the supply chain industry, and also to strengthen the Supply Chain Capacity in the African continent.

The academic head of doctoral programmes at the Gordon Institute of Business Science at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, Professor Helena Barnard, advised stakeholders in the supply chain industry in Africa to take advantage of technological progress to deal with emerging issues in supply chain management.

Professor Barnard acknowledged that technology has come to aid the modern day economy and thus stakeholders in the African supply chain sector should employ digitisation to help provide solutions to the many challenges that affect the supply chain system in the continent.

She emphasised that “if we manage to decolonise our thinking, we can embrace the modern world, we can say digitisation is going to help us in these particular ways, and we can integrate that into our own solutions.”

Responding to how supply chain industry players in Africa can collectively address some of the challenges in the supply chain ecosystem, Professor Barnard urged members of the industry to leverage on the African Continental Free Trade Agreement for a stronger regionalization to the benefit of all stakeholders.

“If we are proactive and we take advantage of the African Free Trade agreement, what is being predicted is stronger regionalisation.”

“If we regionalise the value chain, we could exploit the possibility of regionalization which of course has massive sustainability benefits, because you are not transporting things that far, and I think it drives economic growth,” she stated.

The Director of Center for Applied Research and Innovation in Supply Chain – Africa (CARISCA), Professor Nathaniel Boso from the KNUST school of business speaking to Asaase news indicated that Africa has been lagging behind in the supply chain industry hence the event was organised for industry players in the continent on how Africa can contribute to the global supply chain.

“This year’s theme particularly focused on trying to understand the place of Africa and Ghana in the global supply chain system, that’s because we know that we have not been keen players in the global supply chain, economically the continent has been lagging behind.” he explained.

Irene Pomaa Kumi

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