To have a robust R&I ecosystem you need people who are boundary-spaners. Here is how Cyprus creates a cadre of them.

This is the next article in my answer to the question: “What do you think it needs to be done such that the Cypriot Academic ecosystem reaches to "Stanford and Silicon Valley" type of level?” ?Please note: as always the views expressed are my own and have not been reviewed or approved by anyone but me (which accounts for any typos :) ).

In the first half of the answer I concluded that the Cypriot Research and Innovation (R&I) ecosystem needs to provide many collisions with minimal friction, so it is:

1)????? ?sustainable and resource circulating;

2)????? capable of providing the products, services, and jobs Cypriots need to live good lives;

3)????? able to renew itself even in the face of challenges like climate change, pandemics, etc.; and,

4)????? can do all this without relying on outside resources (including EU funding) if need be.

R&I ecosystems require four kinds of resources:? people, intellectual property, products, and money. It is the people who have the many collisions. The collisions lead to ideas on how to take intellectual property and use it to create products. (They also stimulate ideas for new R&D projects which can create new intellectual property.)? The products, when sold, generate money which is used to pay the people and generate new intellectual property, which regenerates the circular economy of the ecosystem. ?

Of these four resources, people are the most important. In more established and robust R&I ecosystems, this cadre of people already exists., Successful SME executives and entrepreneurs; technology scouts, product line managers, new product development personnel, and corporate accelerator managers ?at mid-size and larger companies; ?retired high tech executives who act as mentors and facilitators; ?angels and venture capitalist; bank loan officers; IP and corporate lawyers; accountants; ?and technology transfer, knowledge transfer, industrial liaison, donor and alumni personal; and top management at universities and other research organizations; and so on have the requisite boundary-spanning skills – a consequence of decades and decades of R&I ecosystem evolution.

In emergent R&I ecosystems like Cyprus, where this cadre has not yet reached critical mass, it must be created in a much shorter time frame. Simply importing people from more mature R&I ecosystems (like the 50% reduction in income tax for relocating here encourages) is helpful, but only when these “nomads” realize Cyprus is not Silicon Valley or Boston and that they have as much to learn about how best to accomplish boundary-spanning here as the Cypriots do. The best ?“nomads” are like the yeast mixed into the flour when making bread. The worst at least provide necessary labor skills currently scare in Cyprus.

So how can we create this cadre of boundary-spaners quickly. The short answer is teaching New Product Development (NPD) as a required course for degrees in both science and engineering and business and management. (Even better is to require it for all students as part of their mandatory courses.) ?Each course should have students from all participating schools. In other words, by teaching a shared cognitive framework through a course that includes fundamentals of NPD and a practical hands-on “sandbox” practicum, this shared experience kick-starts the formation of the desired cadre of boundary-spaners. (For more on sandboxes see MIT Sandbox.)

Focusing only on Cypriot higher education in STEM, I am reminded of university engineering education in the US in the 1980s, whose inadequacies was a major drag on the emergence of the US “high tech” economy. ?From the 1960s to the early 1980s, US engineering education had become increasingly academic and “scientific”.? The result was companies could not readily find graduates who had the skills required for the day-to-day engineering work for which they were hiring. I was retained hired by a coalition of robotics and other advanced technology manufacturing companies to work with leading engineering societies and engineering education associations to bring hands-on practical skills and design thinking back into the curriculum of US universities. As a presentation posted on the University of Washington site notes, the result of this initiative was: “Freshman design, Capstone design (ABET), lab experiences throughout the curriculum became standard. Universities attended more to industry concerns.” There was a shift away from an overly science-driven understanding of what good engineering education looked like to one which was balanced by the importance of ?solid skills for hands-on engineering and applied work. ?(cf History_Engineering_Education_Gateway.pdf (uw.edu))? It is this kind of rebalancing Cyprus needs, especially in STEM.

The sweet spot to target for modifying curriculum in higher education to attain this balance is in the junior year for undergraduate, where coursework can leverage ?understandings of the fundamentals of a STEM discipline gained in the prior two years on the one hand, and yet the course can have an impact on topics for senior theses and plans for the future on the other hand. In graduate education the sweet spot is the first semester of the master’s curriculum, so it can influence the thesis and provide a framework for the applicability of what is being learned. ?For PhD candidates and post-docs who have not had such courses, there should be mandatory attendance as a remedial course. ?

One would hope the universities and Ministry of Education would embrace this approach. If they want students to enroll, students need an expectation of jobs to bear the expense and time commitment of getting educated. The reality is there are not enough jobs in either the academic or public sector (both here and abroad) to hire all the graduates being produced. Furthermore, if Cyprus is serious about being a Regional Innovation Hub, what better way to accelerate that than to create a cadre of people sharing a cognitive framework emphasizing the importance of taking research results and turning them into innovative products and services.?

From an ecosystem efficiency perspective, producing a resource is only productive if there is uptake of the resource elsewhere in the ecosystem. The uptake of people with NPD skills requires NPD be occurring in the ecosystem. Fortunately, there are three sets of incentives for uptake in Cyprus now in place: awareness and training, funding, and tax incentives.

If this educational innovation is adopted, students will still require additional training to be competent, professional NPD team leaders and managers. Increased professionalization ?of? NPD staff will only benefit companies currently conducting it.? For this reason and to increase absorptive capacity in Cypriot companies for in-licensing of academic inventions, ?the Research and Innovation Foundation has established two NPD certification training programs. The training repares candidates to pass the New Product Development Professional certification exam of the Product Development and Management Association, the global certification body for NOPD professionals. ?The Enterprise Capacity Building in NPD ?(RIF – RESEARCH AND INNOVATION FOUNDATION ) supports employment and professional certification of NPD staff at companies with 30 or more employees. The Innovation Factories NPD certification course targets start-ups and smaller companies but is open to anyone in Cyprus. For more information go to INNOVATION FACTORY – RIF (research.org.cy),

The second set of incentives, research and innovation funding, is also provided by RIF through competitive calls. University research globally is typically in the range of Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 1 to 3, which consists of basic research from discovery of scientific principles and phenomena to validation of ways of manipulate those phenomena. These manipulations are called proofs of concept and are accomplished through the use of inventive means what are patentable technologies, techniques, materials, etc. Most university patents are of this nature. Centers of excellence, applied physics labs, research and innovation institutes, and the like, plus some small companies, carry this work forward through TRLs 4 and 5 (technology validation and enhancement in the lab or in the field).? That also yields innovative solutions which also can be patented. Companies gain co-ownership and/or a right of first refusal to license technology, techniques, materials, etc. by participating in consortia with academic institutions, Centers of Excellence, Institutes, and SMEs responding to calls for RIF programs targeting the various TRLs. Thereafter to fund work from TRL 6 forward, companies can recruit junior members of the academic team (post-docs, graduating Ph.Ds. and Masters) as employees whose salaries are then covered by being labor on? winning proposals. ?In addition, some programs directly fund NPD/R&D staff such as Enterprise Capacity Building in NPD, mentioned above, and Ph.D. in Industry.

The third set of incentives involves taxes. Cypriot tax law encourages R&D/NPD. Incentives include there is a 100% deduction for R&D expenses and, at least for 2024? “Companies working in relevant areas will be able to set 120% of their R&D expenses against future profits. In effect, Cyprus will pay businesses to set up and conduct R&D.” (Cyprus targets hi-tech businesses with R&D incentives | CSC Blog (cscglobal.com) Other tax incentives address downstream revenues arising from qualifying assets (e.g. IP) and can bring effective tax rates down to 2.5% on such income.

If there is interest, I can provide my thoughts on how to ?increase the amount of other important resources in the Cypriot ?R&I ecosystem and how to remove obstacles and turbulence in their flow through the ecosystem. Steps are already in place to address these. For example, the Research and Innovation Foundation’s (RIF’S) knowledge transfer program and its IP voucher is addressing the available supply of IP (CENTRAL OFFICE FOR KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER – RIF (research.org.cy)), while ?RIF’s R&D and innovation funding programs plus Cyprus’ very generous R&D and equity investment tax incentives are focused on the money problem. That said, there are some simple things that could be done that could have big impacts, like a Cypriot equivalent to the US Provisional Patent Application.