Nigeria did not make the list of the top 60 most innovative countries in the world, unlike South Africa (SA) and Tunisia, a BusinessDay analysis shows.
Data from the 2019 Bloomberg Innovation Index show that SA and Tunisia ranked 51 and 52 position, scoring 51.3 and 48.9, respectively in 2018.
The Annual Index, in its seventh year, analyses dozens of criteria using seven metrics, which are research and development intensity, manufacturing value-added, productively, high-tech density, tertiary efficiency, researcher concentration and patent activity.
The Index analysed 200 economies. Each was scored on a 0 -100 scale based on seven equally weighted categories. Nations that did not report data for at least six categories were eliminated, trimming the total list to 95. Bloomberg published the top 60 economies, which did not include Nigeria.
Gbolahan Ologunro, an equity research analyst at Lagos-based CSL Stockbrokers, said Nigeria had an underdeveloped technological environment in terms of the ability of especially the youth to be able to use their knowledge and bring about real inventions that would simplify processes in the ease at which things were being carried out.
“If you look at what Nigeria allocates to the education sector, especially the capital expenditure part, it is not sufficient. These two other countries allocate enough and invest in human capital to bring about innovations and inventions,” Ologunro said to BusinessDay in a telephone interview
Innovation is the introduction of new or significantly improved goods or services to the market, or the use of new or significantly improved processes for producing goods and services. It is important to ensuring the future success and competitiveness of business enterprises in an increasingly competitive global economy.
SA and Tunisia have taken up policies to improve their local tech space. For example, SA had a ten-year policy (2008-2018) called innovation towards a knowledge-based economy to drive the country’s transformation towards this new economy, in which the production and dissemination of knowledge lead to economic benefits and enrich all fields of human endeavour.
The progress of the plan is driven by four key elements, which are human capital development, knowledge generation and exploitation, knowledge infrastructure and enablers to address the “innovation chasm” between research results and socioeconomic outcomes.
Also, Tunisia has a start-up Act, a law that sets out government’s policies for start-up growth. The purpose of the law is to put science and technology at the heart of the country’s economic
transformation rather than traditional sectors like tourism and agriculture.
Ayodeji Ebo, MD, Afrinvest Securities Limited, said Nigeria hardly paid for or valued research and development. “For most other countries you will see a lot of non-governmental organisations supporting research, but in Nigeria it is very minimal and if you look at the universities, there are grants for research and development but it is not sufficient,” Ebo said.
