Innovation: Don’t operate in isolation, funders urged

Dar es Salaam. Despite the existence of a variety of financiers of innovation, it has been revealed that there is little coordination between the different funders who are prone to operating in isolation.

This results in duplication of effort, lack of recognition of synergies among them and lack of understanding of how they can best play their part in developing the sector in a coordinated way.

Releasing a new Innovation report on catalyzing and scaling innovation in Tanzania, Human Development Innovation Fund (HDIF) Country Director Joseph Manirakiza said there is a growing need for funders to break out of the silos and see how to coordinate funding approaches to meet the needs of the entire innovation pipeline. “Innovation for development is a new solution with the transformative ability to accelerate impact and can be fueled by science and technology therefore there is need to collaborate and coordinate with funders to avoid duplication of efforts and to direct appropriate levels and types of funding to the areas where it is most needed,” he said.

He said to enable any innovation to balance it needs specific types and levels of support at different stages along its journey Adding that they include particular types of financing from catalytic grants for early-stage social service innovations, to debt and equity for more mature innovations that can absorb commercial investment.

He said an innovation can be developed in many different contexts and scaled through various routes – as a scalable enterprise, in public–private partnerships, through non-profit organisations, or through being adopted.

“There is need to set up an integrated information system that maps the stage of each innovator and the available finance and establish a neutral coordinating body to provide overall coordination of innovation support efforts,” he said.

The report has been launched at a time when 250 scientists across the globe from the Science Granting Councils Initiative convened in the country at the end of last year.

Then the Commission for Science and Technolgy (Costech) Managing Director Amos Nungu said scientists are of the view that open Science in research and innovation for development is vital. However he noted that open science is vital because scientists from developed countries do mega research that developing countries can benefit from.

Meanwhile on funding he said Western countries providing funding resource for research and innovation are in Africa that lack state of the art laboratories to enable them conduct major research that can be found in the western world.

Meanwhile the report highlights that while donors have been the primary source of innovation funding, interest from local investors is gradually increasing. In recent years, investor networks such as the

Tanzania Angel Investors Network (TAIN)10 have sprung up seeking to promote the angel-investing culturev and grow innovative Tanzanian start-ups.

Yet he noted that the interest is still nascent and focuses on the sectors which promise greater returns on investment – typically fintech, telecom, agriculture, energy, and infrastructure.

HDIF has been endeavoring to gain a better understanding of where support is needed by mapping support for innovation in Tanzania against a tried and tested model that tracks innovation from ideation

to scale.

Known as the ‘innovation pipeline’, this process starts from the problem-solving, ideation, or business idea stage, and develops into an innovation and develops into an innovation prototype which is then

tested. If the innovation proves to work, responds to customer needs, and has a working business model it can enter it can enter the growth stage and scale to reach new markets.