Two prestigious awards for incubator
The centre manager, Fatima Moolla, accepted the awards during a conference in the Eastern Cape.
The SmartXchange business incubator received the Most Innovative Centre and Best Overall Performing Centre awards during the recent Small Enterprise Development Agency (Seda) National Awards Ceremony.
The centre manager, Fatima Moolla, accepted the awards during the Business Incubation Web Association (BIWA) held at the Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, Eastern Cape.
According to Moolla, BIWA’s mission is to bridge the gap between academia, community and industry by facilitating the transformation of scientific discoveries and innovations into tangible societal and economic benefits.
She said BIWA is a collaboration initiative dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship, driving innovation and transforming societies through impactful research commercialisation and business incubation while empowering individuals, supporting startups, and creating sustainable solutions to real-world challenges.
“This mission was accomplished by bringing together diverse stakeholders from academia, industry, and government to foster an ecosystem where ideas can flourish and partnerships thrive. This platform set the scene as an enabler to creating strategic partnerships, capacity-building initiatives, and knowledge-sharing sessions to support and empower aspiring entrepreneurs, and startups, and create sustainable solutions to real-world challenges,” she said.
Moolla added the panel discussions covered trends in business incubation, the role of universities in research commercialisation, effective industry partnerships, policies on infusing entrepreneurship in higher education, fourth industrial revolution transformation into business incubation, funding strategies for start-ups, where the latter was chaired by Jonathan Naidoo, the CEO of SmartXchange.
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