According to Michael Kahn, South Africa presents a paradox for innovation studies. Over three decades, its research system has generated scientific output of increasing international standing, while the productive economy has experienced weak growth, premature deindustrialisation, persistent technological dependence, high unemployment and extreme inequality.
Conventional explanations locate the problem within the innovation system itself: inadequate Research & Development expenditure, weak university–industry linkages, limited commercialisation, insufficient venture finance and failures of institutional coordination. Kahn argues that these diagnoses, while identifying genuine weaknesses, mislocate the central problem. He believes the more fundamental question is why the political economy generates insufficient and uneven demand for the knowledge and technological capabilities that the research system produces and examines articulation as the source of the imbalances.
Kahn, who has had a host of careers ranging from physicist to political activist, government official responsible for drafting South Africa’s post-independence science, arts and culture and ICT for education policies, international consultant, and even creator of the production Spider’s Place for the renowned Handspring Puppet Company, is currently an honorary research fellow at the Centre for Research on Evaluation Science and Technology (CREST) at Stellenbosch University.
“Innovation is everywhere,” he said. “Science is about trying to make sense of things. I’m trying to make sense of science.”
“The problem I’m trying to understand is that for three decades our innovation has stagnated in size even while it has produced research of international standing. Innovation in South Africa sits alongside an ailing economy.”
Historically rooted
He traced the history of South Africa's scientific-industrial capabilities from the 1870s mining revolution through state-led industrialisation and the apartheid security state to the post-1994 democratic order.
“The first developmental state in the last quarter of the 20th century generated powerful technological demand through mining, infrastructure, state-owned corporations, industrial protection, procurement and strategic technological missions, albeit within a racially exclusionary political economy,” he explained. “From the 1970s onward, changes in capital accumulation, liberalisation, financialisation, corporate restructuring and declining state capability progressively altered this relationship. The democratic transition transformed the institutions responsible for producing knowledge more rapidly than it transformed the economy responsible for using that knowledge.”
“Over the 20th century South Africa had the most extensive research system in Africa – particularly in agriculture, defence, energy, and mining – all internationally competitive and sustained by the apartheid state,” he said. “The technologically differentiated economy was largely led by and structurally dependent on mining and energy.”
“These inherited ownership patterns proved resistant to change.”
Kahn emphasised that from 1948, when the National Party came to power, attention was directed to the maintenance of the apartheid state. “By the 1980s there was a well-developed industrial and military system with scientific and technical capacity driven by the state and oriented towards repression and warfare on its borders. Mining also demanded knowledge, skills and technologies, and the system emerged to accommodate this.”
From the 1990s, the economy opened, sanctions were lifted, and capital controls eased, but the changing accumulation regime altered the structure of technological demand, and the policy initiatives to correct this have not been successful.
He explained that the Reconstruction and Development Programme introduced by the government in 1994 was an attempt to create a second developmental state combining reconstruction, redistribution and economic transformation. “But results have been poor, especially in inequality and youth unemployment, which stands at 47%. We remain a commodity exporter, productivity growth is low, and beneficiation of minerals is easier said than done.”
“The post-apartheid innovation policy adapted to the changing political economy largely by concentrating on instruments within its locus of control: research funding, human-capital formation, centres of excellence, research chairs, intellectual-property arrangements, commercialisation agencies and flagship science projects,” he said. “However, successive policy instruments continued to conceptualise innovation predominantly from the supply side, while technological demand from firms and the public sector remained weak or inconsistent. The resulting disarticulation helps explain why institutional scientific excellence can coexist with limited productive transformation.”
He noted that the 2007 OECD review of innovation policy highlighted that there was too much emphasis on the state, not industry and a shortage of technical skills, as well as deep concern about rampant inequality and the ticking time bomb of social unrest. A proposed national commission on innovation and research was subsequently recommended but did not materialise.
“Expenditure for the last 20 years shows a collapse in spending on basic sciences and engineering, with rises in social sciences and humanities while agricultural-environmental remained roughly the same and biomedical has increased.”
But there have been some good things – the research system was strengthened, racial and gender differentiation improved, and scientific outputs of international visibility have soared especially in the health sciences, astronomy and astrophysics and ecological sciences.
“South Africa is rated 17th in the ranking of the 10% most highly cited papers globally. We are doing well in areas in which we have expertise like biomedicine and clinical medicine (although much of this is related to participation in clinical trials) but doing less so in areas like materials science and engineering.”
“However, our gross expenditure on R&D at 0.61% of GDP is below where South Korea was 50 years ago and has fallen from a maximum of 0.95% 15 years back. The target was 1% in 2008, which we are nowhere near.”
Kahn also noted that business expenditure on R&D is at only 30% and services expenditure on R&D at about 45%. South Africa is patenting very little but is copyrighting at a higher rate than South Korea, and has fallen to rank 61 on the global innovation index.
There are 1.8 researchers per 1000 employed compared to 9.3 in Australia and 15.3 in South Korea.
“But, interestingly, South African researchers/academics and professors are among the highest paid in the world, with university Vice Chancellors the highest paid in the world,” he added. “We do well in certain fields and reward ourselves accordingly, which is part of the paradox.”
But Kahn believes the big question is why the political economy is generating so little sustained demand for the knowledge produced by the research system?
“I don’t believe the innovation system has failed; the institutions are there and doing their stuff but there’s a problem in articulation with the economy,” he said. “We live with path dependence. The minerals-industrial complex reflects in the export profile. And we are stuck back where we were with GDP per capita going sideways.”
“We must think more about articulation, which looks at how power, institutions and inherited capabilities determine the strength of direction and developmental consequences of interactions. There is a failure of the existing relationships to transfer sufficient demand and resources to transfer outcomes.”
A complex spaghetti
“I’m trying to understand the power politics – why things were funded, why things were ignored, why things were spread over different universities instead of concentrating efforts. I believe we need a better understanding of how universities work; we need to think critically about the signals that come from the system of production and better understanding of demand signals.”
“In a political economy of articulation there are five important aspects – the need to embed in systems of production; demand matters as much as supply; state capability is central; innovation is spatially uneven; and innovation outcomes are distributive.”
“On the positive side, what philosopher Michael Polanyi famously named the Republic of Science is now much more socially responsible and has tremendous talent – as evidenced by how we rose to the challenge of HIV. There are many examples of how universities have reoriented to deal with industrial and social problems.”
“We went from a somewhat closed extractive economy to an open economy, from warfare to welfare. Arguably we have a basic welfare state which is unique in the developing world. It’s not what we want, but we are there. In 1962, South Africa was described as colonialism of a special type. I believe we may have an economy of a special type.”
“Having natural resources doesn’t automatically mean you benefit. We are sitting on the largest global platinum and manganese resources, but we are not a world leader in beneficiation and research in these critical minerals,” he continued. “There is also a lot of money in South Africa, with some companies generating 60 to 70% of their revenue internationally. The quality of what we are trading internationally is high but is not being responded to sufficiently by the demand signals of the government. That’s the big problem.”
“Innovative activity is taking place across the economy in spite of, not because of government. The much-vaunted research-to-innovation sequence is not borne out by experience and there is pressure on the universities to meet everyone’s desires.”
“Twenty years ago the slogan was Batho Pele – People first. The current reality is ‘me first, me bureaucrat, me chief director’. The tripartite alliance brings together the ruling African National Congress, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, and the consequence has been to maintain the aristocracy of labour. Civil servants are overpaid, academics are overpaid. The salary bills squeeze out the maintenance bills. The relationship between the ruling party and trade unions keeps the ruling party in power. It’s corporatism of a special type. We must have this conversation.”
Article: Michelle Galloway
Picture: Curt Ruiters, Quickclick Productions