By Florence Afriyie Mensah, GNA
Kumasi, Aug 02, GNA – Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) has scaled up the drive towards forging stronger partnership with industry to stimulate economic growth.
This involves deepening their engagement - to generate innovative and strategic ideas to make the university’s programmes relevant to the real needs of industry.
As part of this a day’s stakeholders’ conference had been held in Kumasi and brought together representatives of the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI), Association of Small Scale Industries (ASSI) and the academia.
“Strengthening academia-industry collaboration for national development” was the theme chosen for the meeting.
It came under the KNUST’s “Building stronger universities” project funded by the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) and a consortium of Danish universities, led by University of Copenhagen.
Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry, Mr. Robert Ahomka-Lindsay, addressing the conference, underlined the need for the university to engage industry in its research activities.
This, he said, had become vital given the complexities of the current economic environment and the fierce competition resulting from globalization, something that had made the integration of science and technology into the operation of businesses imperative.
It was for this reason that building academia-industry linkages was critical, he added.
Mr. Ahomka-Lindsay noted that academia had become the prime source of ideas that were increasingly being translated into viable market commodities - service provision, product manufacturing and improvement in systems, processes and procedures of the corporate world.
It is estimated that, about 75 per cent of patents registered in the United States has their origins in the universities.
He indicated that research and development was of great importance to business as production processes and methods kept rapidly changing and improving in complexity and technology.
Professor Mrs. Ibok Oduro, Provost, College of Science, spoke of the determination of the university to strengthen its research capacity through the implementation of well-thought out programmes and activities.
The event was used to launch the KNUST Academia-Industry Database, a project funded by DANIDA, and aimed at assisting the university to be more responsive to the pressing needs of the society.
GNA
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