Africa’s innovation kings, measured by patents

[Smatta]

South Africa leads the Africa patents table…by far. Followed by Kenya in a distant second, then Egypt, Zimbabwe, Morocco. Outside of these five countries, no other African country registered any international patents from 2007.

Patents are a crude measure of a country’s innovativeness. Crude because the number of patents registered also depends on how fast the patents offices register inventions and innovations.

In Africa, though, South Africa and Kenya are the innovation leaders when it comes, especially, to digital products and software. Then South Africa beats every other African country hands down when it comes to innovation in medicine.
Though some data shows Nigeria poised to be Africa’s largest economy in five to 15 years, the fact that it is not a particularly innovative country raises questions about whether it will ever really attain economic greatness.

Though there is no clear connection, it is also striking looking at the 40 highest towns, that the majority are in Kenya; however all the top innovative African nations have cities in the mix – including Zimbabwe which, otherwise, many would dismiss as a basket case following the last ten years of disastrous rule by President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF.

The altitude table might also explain why Kenya, Ethiopia, and Morocco are world champions at the marathon, and the middle distance races. Living at high altitude, and training at low altitude has been shown to boost athletic performance.

It is worth investigating if high altitude also boosts creativity. If God (for those who believe) and history put peoples in the countries and geography they inhabit, then countries like Kenya and South Africa, if they ever become Africa’s economic and political powers (South Africa is already Africa’s economic king), they know who to thank.

AFRICA?S INNOVATION KINGS, MEASURED BY PATENTS
Kenya is an African leader in developing innovative « African Press International (API)

 

[nomasana]

still pathetic but atleast kenyans are innovative

 

[Hukumuzuku]

South Africa leads the Africa patents table…by far. Followed by Kenya in a distant second, then Egypt, Zimbabwe, Morocco. Outside of these five countries, no other African country registered any international patents from 2007.

Patents are a crude measure of a country’s innovativeness. Crude because the number of patents registered also depends on how fast the patents offices register inventions and innovations.

In Africa, though, South Africa and Kenya are the innovation leaders when it comes, especially, to digital products and software. Then South Africa beats every other African country hands down when it comes to innovation in medicine.
Though some data shows Nigeria poised to be Africa’s largest economy in five to 15 years, the fact that it is not a particularly innovative country raises questions about whether it will ever really attain economic greatness.

Though there is no clear connection, it is also striking looking at the 40 highest towns, that the majority are in Kenya; however all the top innovative African nations have cities in the mix – including Zimbabwe which, otherwise, many would dismiss as a basket case following the last ten years of disastrous rule by President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF.

The altitude table might also explain why Kenya, Ethiopia, and Morocco are world champions at the marathon, and the middle distance races. Living at high altitude, and training at low altitude has been shown to boost athletic performance.

It is worth investigating if high altitude also boosts creativity. If God (for those who believe) and history put peoples in the countries and geography they inhabit, then countries like Kenya and South Africa, if they ever become Africa’s economic and political powers (South Africa is already Africa’s economic king), they know who to thank.

AFRICA?S INNOVATION KINGS, MEASURED BY PATENTS
Kenya is an African leader in developing innovative « African Press International (API)

There's simply no objective, empirical evidence that lends support to this kind of claim. No details are provided as to which "International Patent" database the alleged data is derived from. Most patent databases are usually available online to the general public, and the data is many cases amenable to searches by anybody who wishes to. But what's so troubling about this so-called "news" is the author's resorting to tired stereotypes about the supposed superiority of Kenyan athletes,and some bizarre, suspect appeal to God-given geographical attributes as possible explanations to Kenya's leading "innovativeness"? No one should buy into this fake B.S. "news".

 

[Chamoto]

I checked the credibility of your sources, I can tell you, I smell something fishy.

 

[nomasana]

I checked the credibility of your sources, I can tell you, I smell something fishy.

i googled and this is what i came up with

Kenya is still the second most innovative country in Sub-Saharan Africa according to this year's rankings, despite political turmoil after the 2007 elections.

The country ranked 48 out of 133 in the 2009/2010 Global Competitiveness Report, released by the World Economic Forum yesterday (8 September).

It dropped just six places from last year's 42 and retained its position behind South Africa - 41 in the rankings this year - in the Sub-Saharan Africa category. The country is struggling with the aftermath of violence following the December 2007 elections including lower food production and a drop in tourism revenue.

Kenya is an interesting case, says Jennifer Blanke, senior economist for the World Economic Forum and one of the authors of the report, because countries usually do not focus on innovation until they reach a more advanced stage of economic development.

The country has impressive private spending on research and development (R&D), good research links between research institutions and the business sector and boasts a pretty stable performance since last year, says Blanke.

Its ranking for company spending on R&D and university-industry collaboration remained unchanged at thirty-seventh and fortieth respectively.

"Kenya is starting to get the complex productivity drivers right and would be well served by improving on more basic areas such as government institutions, health and security," says Blanke.

The annual report, a collaborative effort by the World Economic Forum, the African Development Bank and the World Bank, assesses the relative competitiveness and costs of doing business in countries.

It identifies three major development stages, with innovation becoming increasingly important as economies grow in sophistication.

According to Blanke other Sub-Saharan African countries rank quite low for innovation, which is not yet a problem because they are in an earlier development stage, but she noted Namibia's rise from 111 to 103 in the table this year, largely because of the country's improving scientific research institutions and increased patenting.

Tanzania also improved - from 101 to 93 - with an improved ranking in many subcategories.

Many other African countries improved. In southern Africa, Botswana climbed to 71, Lesotho to 95, Madagascar to 84, Mozambique to 105, and Zambia to 90.

In the west, Burkina Faso was ranked at 76, Benin 89, Cameroon 102, the Gambia 72, Ivory Coast 104 and Senegal 54. Burundi and Chad camein at 116 and 120 respectively.

Malawi and Mauritania's position remained unchanged at 94 and 125. Those that dropped included Nigeria (73), Mali (81), Mauritius (85), Uganda (98), Ethiopia (112), Ghana (115) and Zimbabwe (124).
Kenya maintains innovation despite political strife - SciDev.Net

 

[Kang]

The part about high altitude was a strange thing to put in the article, but the rest sounds about right, South Africa in the lead for sure then everybody else.

 

[Chamoto]

i googled and this is what i came up with

I just ran one of my powerful latent semantic link analysis algorithm python script, to figure out the credibility of what you've posted and according to my results, nothing seems credible.

This script queries google using a combination of complex operators and operands like site:, intitle:, +/-, inachor:, inurl: and intext: to get the best possible semantic results.

There is no way I only get about nine results out of 1,680,000 results in google serp.

Remember that article was first posted in Sep 9, 2009 at scidev.net. If it was credible, there shouldn't been at least 50 results from different sources (urls) indexed on google by now, mind you, it's been over two years. Those other eight results you see (allafrica.com and others) are news aggrigator sites, they copy from each other to make up that nine, in other word, there is only one source (scidev.net). Nothing from the bbc, nation, reuters and Mail/Guardian of SA (I've selected these for a reason, note! No TZ source), now tell me if you don't smell something here?

Unless google's muscle system architecture of 1 million (1,000,000) powerful computers, running in parallel, crawling any useful information found on the web, every millisecond is faulty, you just proved how much ....

If you didn't know, nomasana, it was for this reason google became famous because in 1995 Lary Page and Sergey Brin while doing their PHD at Stanford, they created an algorithm called backrub (google) to anlyse links in order to determine which page is more relevant (roughly credible).

You seem to have no clue of how the internet works, you can't just copy something online and say, hey, "look what I found! I'm gonna make a thread at JF". Any dummy can post an article on free hosted wordpress blog, so before you start a thread next time do your home work to have something in your hand to back it up.

 

[Hukumuzuku]

One does not need to be an acclaimed, award-winning Journalist to produce some made-up, vague, "feel-good" article about any topic these days, and have it published on the Internet. Its called junk journalism: and apparently the only requirement is a willingness and some degree of effort in allowing one's imagination to run free.

Therefore its imperative that the individual who started this thread provide us with the specifics as to what, when, how, who, why etc, including raw data to back up the story's main contention about Kenya's alleged prime position in Africa on measures of "innovativeness" and "inventiveness".

What's clear though is that, the field "Country of origin" in many Patent databases only means that the owner of the patent happened to reside in that particular country at time of patent registration. It does in no way imply race or ethnicity of the patent owner. That said, it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out that a majority of the patents registered for Kenya in International databases actually have non-native Kenyans as assignees.

 

[simplemind]

Here are example Kenya innovation:

1.M pesa which has revolutionized money transfer.Inventor student ,sold rights to London firm.

2. An sms based violence mapping software developed by Ushahidi at height of 2007post election crisis.Software has been used to map incidence of violence in Gaza,S.Africa and Congo.

Wondering what happened to Bamboo pipe invention by Tanzanian civil Engineer.Trouble is we lack instituonal support to develop invention to market level.

 

[Chamoto]

Here are example Kenya innovation:

1.M pesa which has revolutionized money transfer.Inventor student ,sold rights to London firm.

2. An sms based violence mapping software developed by Ushahidi at height of 2007post election crisis.Software has been used to map incidence of violence in Gaza,S.Africa and Congo.

Wondering what happened to Bamboo pipe invention by Tanzanian civil Engineer.Trouble is we lack instituonal support to develop invention to market level.

Mkuu, we don't have issues with our neighbor's innovation, if you check some of my past posts you'll see how many times I praised them for their courage but what I'm having problem with (on this thread) is the credibility of that information.