1. Introduction

Vice Chancellor, Dean  of  EBIT,  Professors, members of  the  academic community, friends and colleagues, greetings to you all friends and thank you for being here this evening.  A special thank you to the Vice Chancellor, Professor Tawana Kupe, and the Dean of Engineering, Professor Sunil Maharaj for officiating and for the introduction.    

There is a common misconception that an academic post is a sinecure, an opportunity to earn an income without doing any work.  In my experience, and I have worked in public, private, NGO and the university sectors, this is fake news.   Over the  last two months, there has been an avalanche of inaugurals, including an address last week by the Vice Chancellor himself.  And all of this in addition to their day jobs.  Thank you once again, Professors Kupe and Maharaj, for officiating and for your enormous contribution to the university.

The  title of  my  lecture, “the  challenge of industrial development, insights from  research and practice”, sounds a little old fashioned in terms of economic policy.  Industrial development conjuresinto being images of smoke stacks and Dickensian factories with machines belching steam and workers stripped to the waist shovelling coal into open furnaces.  Just to reassure you, that is not my focus.  Today,  I  am  talking  about  tertiary  or  high-value  added  industries  such  as  biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and renewables.    

The first question is “Why should we care? Is industrial development important?”  In delivering the 2021  Hendrik van der Bijl lecture, Andre de Ruyter rather provocatively cited the example of Australia, which has a  manufacturing value added at  6% of GDP,  almost half  our value, and  yet remains a developed country with a high per capita income.  Today, the importance of manufacturing is not up for  debate.   The  evidence, in  my  book, is  overwhelmingly in favour  of the need for  industrial development.    My comparator countries are Turkey at close to 20%, China at 26% and India at 13%.

So my questions are … what kind of industrial development and how do we get there?  I will be covering four different theory-based approaches to high-tech industrial development, illustrated by four examples.  The four are: 

• Firm-level research and development (R&D)
• Sector development through industrial policy
• Innovation-led industrial development and economic growth
• Socio-technical systems and theories of transition

The approaches will be described in the form of a personal journey, held together by a philosophical undercurrent which will attempt to explain why we make the life choices that we do in navigating the complexity of the world and the opportunities which it may present.