Research and technology days

Martin Henry

What if ganja were to be made a legal product in Jamaica like sister drugs; tobacco and alcohol? Government could save around $5.54 billion per year in enforcement costs. And could earn up to $363 million if ganja were taxed like normal goods. If more heavily taxed like tobacco and alcohol, that figure could jump to as much as $1.3 billion. And if the product could be legally exported, up to $15 billion could be pulled in as taxes.

These are 2007 dollar figures and are the estimates of a UTech researcher in a paper on 'The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition in Jamaica'. The paper was recently published in The Journal of Arts Science and Technology, UTech's flagship research publication and come Thursday, will be presented in the Speakers' Forum at the University's Research & Technology Day.

The big ganja man himself, distinguished research scientist and technopreneur Dr Henry Lowe, who has recently launched Medicanja, Jamaica's first medical ganja company, will be guest speaker.

The universities have been putting their research and innovation work on public display in Research & Technology Days. The UWI went for three days, February 19-21, and NCU had a whole Research Week last week.

Coming out of its Research & Technology Days, the UWI struck gold with NCB putting up US$1 million to endow a professorial chair and fund research in an area of interest to the bank - corporate renewal and transformation.

Mona principal, Prof Archibald McDonald, had made an appeal for corporate support for research, which was picked up by media and picked up from media by the bank. "We need partners to fund our research and, maybe, even more importantly, we need partners to convert some of the research into commercial activities," McDonald had pleaded.

And, apparently, playing drum (Archie McDonald) and tambourine (Prof Evan Duggan, dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences), as was featured in one newspaper, can help to drum up support from corporate Jamaica!

What Prof McDonald was talking about was two of the strands of what research managers like to call the tri-helix model: The intertwining of academia, government and industry in producing research results which can end up transforming society and economy.

SOUTH AFRICAN MODEL

I have previously written, drawing on the National Research Foundation of South Africa model, on the absolute necessity of government putting up a competitive research fund as more and more developing countries are doing, adopting the long-established strategy which has helped the developed world to be the developed world. We now have a STEM ministry where the S&T part is for science and technology. What's that about?

NCB, as a business organisation into profit-making, quite pragmatically said the partnership with UWI for research on corporate renewal and transformation would be useful to the bank in generating new knowledge to guide Jamaican firms [which use bank credit as NCB customers!] on how to develop dynamic capabilities and strategies for profitable growth.

On a far smaller scale than US$1 million, NCB's main rival, Scotiabank, has been supporting a professorial chair at UTech in entrepreneurship and development with a special focus on the micro, small and medium-sized enterprises sector. JMMB has been supporting UTech activities in entrepreneurship, ethics and leadership, and the school in which those activities are anchored is named after JMMB founder, Joan Duncan.

And the JPS has for years supported a power lab at UTech for the training of power engineers, who the company needs in its own operations, and is about to put in a 100KW solar-powered generating plant on the campus. So the wheels are turning.

One can easily see how Tameka Lindo's ganja paper could influence public policy, although other sides of the matter of decriminalisation need to be studied for proper evidence-based decision-making. This is what universities do and need the resources to do. UTech can only afford to put up J$10 million of its own money each year in a Research Development Fund for staff. A mere drop in the bucket.

So considering its public-policy implications and the current renewed ganja debate, can we expect the ministers of finance, of industry, investment and commerce, and of national security, and key members of their staff, to attend Ms Lindo's Speakers' Forum presentation at UTech on Thursday?

BIG PROJECTS

UTech is uniquely positioned to produce practical solutions to economic, social and technological problems via research. For example, its biggest current project with partners, backed by the European Union and the countries of the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States financing, is aimed at using solar energy to produce hydrogen gas from water, which is the most abundant compound on the planet, as a cheap, safe, alternative cooking fuel. The principal investigator will be talking about his work on Thursday at Research & Technology Day.

Deploying its IT capabilities, the university has developed e-learning software designed to help deaf students learn English better and, therefore, to succeed better in education and in the world. Deaf children have problems learning prepositions and conjunctions in English which are not used in sign language. The multimedia software is designed to help them over that difficulty.

As it comes into its stride as a serious research institution, the young university has identified some key areas for research focus, all of which are related to practical issues of national and wider concern. Among the focal areas are: energy, and a Caribbean Sustainable Energy and Innovation Institute has been established. ICT applications. Sports, and work on anti-doping rules and sports development will be on show on Thursday. Health. Food, an active research group has produced a cassava use book. And land management, with the university already doing a number of research consultancies for the Government. Other research foci include entrepreneurship with an endowed professorial chair. Tribology (the science of material wear from friction which globally cost industry billions per year) with a UNESCO-supported professorial chair and a filed patent. And technical/vocational education with a UNESCO-supported Tech/Voc Education centre.

The university's first PhD graduate is now a globally in-demand expert on cloud computing and is down to speak on the subject. Work is being done on data mining and apps development in ICT.

Other papers will be presented in the Speakers' Forum on Thursday on the correlation between music and mathematics scores, on the delivery of mental-health services, on using technology to improve the delivery of justice in the courts, and on 3-D printing technology, among others.

UTech has participated in a number of EU-ACP-financed international projects with partners in Africa and Europe for building research management capacity, the latest, led by the University of Alicante in Spain, a centre of excellence in the field, being designed to build capacity to manage intellectual property rights and knowledge transfer from research. The university is the secretariat for the Caribbean Research & Innovation Management Association, which was formed out of one of the projects.

I hardly need to tell readers that the university has its problems. But UTech is rising to its stride in those critical areas which make universities universities: research, graduate-level education, and research-driven service to the larger society which supports them. A university research and technology day says to the other tri-helix partners, government and industry, and to the society at large, "with your support, here's what we can do and have been doing". And the usual response is, "But wi never know."