Page 49 - DUT Annual Report 2020

capacity building activities were initiated in 2020, including a capacity building module for academic staff at DUT in COIL and International Virtual Engagement.
In May 2020 DUT won the bid to consult for the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) on a number of international virtual engagement activities, including development of the annual Summer School that ran virtually for the first time in 2020. The output of this consultancy is the Virtual Engagement for International Student Exchange Toolkit. This toolkit has been made available to all ACU member institutions in the Commonwealth. Through engagement with this toolkit, the DUT ethos that promotes internationalisation of the curriculum, decolonisation of the curriculum and diversity within the classroom has been taken to the global stage.
RESEARCH AND INNOVATION
In terms of Research and Innovation, 2020 will be remembered as the first year that DUT entered theTimes Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings. As a first-time entrant, it was a significant achievement to be ranked 5th nationally and in the top 500 globally for the year 2021. Additionally, the University was ranked 90th in the THE Emerging Economies. These rankings are attributed to the knowledge products generated and the impact they have had both nationally and globally over the last 5 years.
Nationally, the University maintained its overall performance for research publications, Master’s and Doctoral outputs, in 15th position overall and 1st amongst UoTs for 2019 units submitted to DHET in 2020. Overall, the research and innovation agenda continued to focus on the ten core areas identified as part of the research and innovation strategy (2014 – 2019, extended to 2020). These areas included capacity building amongst our academic staff, both in terms of credentialing qualifications and improving their research skills, mandated by the University Capacity Development Grant. Increasing the pool of postgraduate students, who for DUT come from previously disadvantaged groups of our society, also remained a priority, as well as ensuring they were supported and exposed to research capacity building and grant opportunities. We launched
the Supporting Undergraduate Research Excellence (SURE) programme, that brings together a community of practice that is embedding research in undergraduate teaching and learning. This initiative aims to increase the pool of students at postgraduate level by inculcating a research culture at undergraduate level.
Our Research and Innovation focus areas continued to be aligned to the SDGs, with new emerging areas identified in Green Engineering and Smart Cities. Food and Nutrition Security also remains a priority area for development. As an extension of the Space Science programme, DUT joined the Hydrogen Intensity Real-Time Analysis Experiment (HIRAX), which is a consortium of South African and International partners, co-funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) and its partners over the next 5 years. These are high- impact partnerships that contribute to the impact of our products and innovations.
Finally, the University managed to exceed its internally adjusted target on third-stream income in 2020, despite the early indications of an economic slowdown, and raised R110 179 711. While not meeting the approved target, the University still surpassed the achievement of 2019.
Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) Seed-funded Projects
TIA is a national public entity that serves as the key institutional intervention to bridge the innovation chasm between research and development from HEIs, science councils, public and private sector entities and commercialisation. The purpose of the Seed Fund is to assist innovators at HEIs, science councils and, small and medium-sized enterprises to advance their research outputs into prototypes and fundable ideas for commercialisation. It also enables innovators to de-risk research outputs for follow-on funding from TIA and/or other funders.
In 2019/2020 five projects were funded by the TIA (Table 4). The Technology, Transfer and Innovation unit is planning to launch spin-off companies from those projects that are at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 6 and 7.5
DURBAN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY ANNUAL REPORT 2020
5. Further information about TRLs can be found at https://wwwtia.org.za/core/uploads/209/12/TRL-1.pdf
47