Abuja- The Bank of Industry (BoI) on Thursday signed a partnership agreement with the National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP) to promote development technology for national development.
The BoI Managing Director, Mr Rasheed Olaoluwa, signed the partnership agreement in Abuja during a working visit to the Director-General of NOTAP, Dr Umar Bindir.
Olaoluwa said the impact of the fall in crude oil price had made a lot of Nigerians sensitive, adding that the need for diversification had brought about thinking towards innovations in technology.
He said the bank had the intention of linking the centres of innovation to industrialists, Small and Medium-scale Enterprises (SMEs) to prevent wastage of ideas generated in the laboratories.
Olaoluwa urged NOTAP to make technologies in its data base available to the bank to enable it to share with its customers.
He said the report of the United Nations Commission for Africa in 2013 advocated for commodity-based industrialisation for the continent, adding that most African countries derived their revenues from products.
According to the BoI boss, agricultural products, crude oil and solid minerals are the major products that Africa rely on, adding that there is a need to add value to the products through technology.
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“We want to link the centres of innovation like yours, like NASENI and FIIRO to industrialists, SMEs, otherwise the ideas will die in the laboratories.
“We are interested in assisting the Nigerian companies in leapfrogging because the rest of the world are moving at a fast pace in technology with a lot happening on a daily basis.
“A Chinese company called “Chao mi” that started only in 2010, about five years later, is now the third largest phone maker in the whole world after I-phone and Samsumg.
“That tells me that if we can work together and put the right elements in place, we can actually leapfrog and become frontier in the next five to 10 years,” he said.
The NOTAP Director-General said that Nigeria had many innovations that had been on the research table for some time without further development and utilisation.
Bindir said that most of the technologies in the country today were foreign, using local products which “have not added value to the country’s economy”.
According to him, technology is not just about the product, “you must understand the industry and the packaging because technology is all about patenting and Intellectual Property Right (IPR) issues”.
“We want the partnership between NOTAP and BoI to jointly carry out surveys on the technology institutions in the country and how they can add value to local innovations,” he said. (NAN)