Innovation Fund Awards RCIPS

The overall winner of the competition was North West University, who received the grand prize of R550,000. Durban University of Technology won the "Best Newcomer" prize for entering for the first time, whilst NMMU won "Best Overall Improvement in Technological Innovation"

McLean Sibanda and Duncan Raftesath, Joint Acting Directors of Innovation Fund, handed out the awards at a function at Simons, Groot Constantia, and Minister of Science and Technology Mr Mosibudi Mangena gave the keynote address.

The competition alternates with the Student Business Plan Competition, which will be run again in 2009.

The award-winning case study was about a Section 21 company, Cell-Life, a pioneering initiative that develops ICT-based solutions to support the management and monitoring of HIV-related activities in the areas of prevention, voluntary counselling and testing and treatment. "The core focus over recent years has been on antiretroviral treatment with additional custom solutions developed in other arenas to meet specific customer requirements."

The competition is judged on a 20-page written submission and statistics questionnaire, which looked at policies and approaches to IP protection and innovation within the TTO, as well as across the university. It was great that a number of initiatives, including those of the Graduate School of Business, strengthened UCT's submission. One of the judges commented that it was great to see that UCT was managing to achieve both fronts, i.e. in terms of innovation as well as with academic outputs such as publications, etc.