NBTI establishes technical working group for innovation commercialisation coordination in Nigeria

The National Board for Technology Incubation (NBTI) has established the Technical Working Group (TWG) to drive coordination of innovation commercialisation activities and data in the country.

While inaugurating TWG in Abuja, the Director General of NBTI, Dr Kazeem Kolawole, said the agency has the mandate to lead and coordinate innovation commercialisation activities in Nigeria.

He explained that the Board has set up the NBTI Innovation Commercialisation and Scaling Technical Working Group (TWG) as a coordination platform to bring together actors supporting innovation commercialization across the country.

Raji charged the TWG to promote coordinated access to innovation commercialisation activities for promising research outputs and prototypes capable of addressing Nigerians’ needs, noting that if properly harnessed, innovations could transform sectors, create jobs and grow the economy.

He said that better database management of innovation commercialization data across programmes in the country will enable better understanding of how innovation commercialization is progressing in line with national targets and their overall contribution to economic growth

“The TWG has its Terms of Reference adopted by participating stakeholders. NBTI established the TWG platform with technical assistance from the WACID team.”

While calling for greater investment in Nigeria’s innovation sector, the country lead of WACID, Omowunmi Olabalu Asani, stated that the platform will strengthen coordination, reduce bottlenecks for innovators; promote visibility and evidence generation across innovation commercialisation stakeholder groups by mapping innovation commercialisation programmes, investments, innovation hubs, parks, university outputs, research institutions, private-sector actors, investors, CSOs and…