Date: 28/06/2005
Source: Department of Science and Technology
Title: Hanekom: Founding of Fabrication Laboratory
Address by Deputy Minister Hanekom at the “Founding” of the Fabrication Laboratory (Fablab) at the Innovation Hub in Pretoria
Our guest of honour, Professor Neil Gershenfeld of the Centre for Bits and Atoms at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Ambassador Kimonyo,
Honoured guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen
Thank you for affording me the privilege of being with you at this prestigious occasion of “founding” the Advanced Manufacturing Technology Strategy Fabrication Laboratory (FabLab). Innovation and economic growth have become inseparable. It’s on everyone’s agenda. There are hundreds of books published every year with creativity or innovation as their main theme. Private sector investment in innovation programmes has become the order of the day. If you type the word innovation on a Google search engine, you get over 12 million hits. Just about everyone would agree today that innovation is the fundamental source of competitive advantage. It is the biggest single factor leading to global competitiveness – far more important in this era than natural resource advantage. There are several reasons why this is so. The internet explosion has flooded ordinary people with information and access to sources previously inaccessible. This has lead to more sophisticated and more demanding consumers. On the other end, globalisation has opened up the gateway to worldwide competition. And if you add to that the rapid pace of improvements in science and technology, you have a setting where it has truly become “the survival of the fittest”. This brings us to innovation, the mainspring of new value. Information and communications technologies (ICTs) have been used as a social development tool, bringing technology to the people and empowering them through information that they can use to improve themselves. The next phase of the digital revolution will then go beyond personal computation to personal fabrication. This is the ability and capacity to design and produce your own products, in your own home, with a machine that combines consumer electronics with industrial tools. Clearly this opens a window of a much more enhanced product with a further scope for greater value-addition, most of whose research will be conducted virtually. The FabLab concept takes the digital revolution to another level, where the empowerment of people through ICT is extended to economic empowerment. An entrepreneurial manufacturer working in a garage can use ICT together with personal fabrication to make almost anything. The only “raw material” that is needed is innovation and creativity- attributes that South Africans have an abundance of. Recently we launched the National Advanced Manufacturing Technology Laboratories for Robotics and Mechatronics in the Eastern Cape Province. The laboratory is geared towards improving the competitiveness of the automotive industry in that region. The founding of this FabLab is equally exciting. It demonstrates that the activities of the AMTS do not impact only on the interests of big business. The benefits are equally extended to small, medium and micro-enterprises (SMMEs), which is one of the focus areas of government in terms of stimulating economic growth and employment creation. This technological revolution could open the door to solving local community problems by developing new products or starting new businesses, which will lead to wealth creation. Government and the Department of Science and Technology in particular support these types of initiatives to enhance innovation in our country. The ability of the FabLab technology to allow people to create the objects they desire, and the kind of world they want to live in, will make a further contribution towards bridging the innovation chasm. It will provide mechanisms and facilities that South Africans could use to manufacture products resulting from their own innovation. Perhaps most importantly it has the potential to reverse the current trend of South African innovations ending up in foreign countries due to inadequate support structures for innovators at home. The DST strongly endorses the plan to use the FabLab as a training facility to teach students, innovators and entrepreneurs to use the tools available to manufacture almost anything. Most importantly, it will support the DST’s commitment to building a strong scientific human capital base in this country. It is only with appropriately skilled human resources that we will have sustainable economic growth. This also compliments other government initiatives that are in place to stimulate innovation, including the Godisa incubators and the Tshumisano Technology Stations which provides a multi-disciplinary advisory centre for aspiring entrepreneurs. The DST is also developing programmes on Nanotechnology research, which is a frontier programme that is envisaged to have a significant impact on manufacturing and manufacturing technologies. As much as our government through the DST is committed to enhancing the technological capability of our country, unless this is done through strong partnerships our success rate will always be limited. I therefore encourage you to forge partnerships in your areas of activity in order to ensure that together, we achieve our respective goals. The challenge will be to ensure that this good concept and all the potential it holds does become available to ordinary men and women who currently are economically active in the so-called second economy, but who could, with the right kind of technological support break through their present barriers and become valuable participants in the mainstream economy. In the process wealth and jobs will be created. Only then we will be able to truly say that our technologies have made a real difference. Michelangelo needed a wall to do his painting. But he also needed scaffolding, brushes and other paraphernalia to depict his images much more elaborately and lucidly. The emergence of fabrication laboratories has given us the wall. What will we capture on it? Will we industriously paint the picture of an empowered and poverty- free society, a society of inventers?
It is therefore my pleasure to say the following as I declare this Fabrication Laboratory officially founded: ‘Like water that cascades through the ravine let us flow and resist fixation. Let us cause the poor in particular and society in general, to benefit from this new wave of technology’
I thank you. Issued by: Department of Science and Technology
28 June 2005
Source: Department of Science and Technology
Title: Hanekom: Founding of Fabrication Laboratory
Address by Deputy Minister Hanekom at the “Founding” of the Fabrication Laboratory (Fablab) at the Innovation Hub in Pretoria
Our guest of honour, Professor Neil Gershenfeld of the Centre for Bits and Atoms at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Ambassador Kimonyo,
Honoured guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen
Thank you for affording me the privilege of being with you at this prestigious occasion of “founding” the Advanced Manufacturing Technology Strategy Fabrication Laboratory (FabLab). Innovation and economic growth have become inseparable. It’s on everyone’s agenda. There are hundreds of books published every year with creativity or innovation as their main theme. Private sector investment in innovation programmes has become the order of the day. If you type the word innovation on a Google search engine, you get over 12 million hits. Just about everyone would agree today that innovation is the fundamental source of competitive advantage. It is the biggest single factor leading to global competitiveness – far more important in this era than natural resource advantage. There are several reasons why this is so. The internet explosion has flooded ordinary people with information and access to sources previously inaccessible. This has lead to more sophisticated and more demanding consumers. On the other end, globalisation has opened up the gateway to worldwide competition. And if you add to that the rapid pace of improvements in science and technology, you have a setting where it has truly become “the survival of the fittest”. This brings us to innovation, the mainspring of new value. Information and communications technologies (ICTs) have been used as a social development tool, bringing technology to the people and empowering them through information that they can use to improve themselves. The next phase of the digital revolution will then go beyond personal computation to personal fabrication. This is the ability and capacity to design and produce your own products, in your own home, with a machine that combines consumer electronics with industrial tools. Clearly this opens a window of a much more enhanced product with a further scope for greater value-addition, most of whose research will be conducted virtually. The FabLab concept takes the digital revolution to another level, where the empowerment of people through ICT is extended to economic empowerment. An entrepreneurial manufacturer working in a garage can use ICT together with personal fabrication to make almost anything. The only “raw material” that is needed is innovation and creativity- attributes that South Africans have an abundance of. Recently we launched the National Advanced Manufacturing Technology Laboratories for Robotics and Mechatronics in the Eastern Cape Province. The laboratory is geared towards improving the competitiveness of the automotive industry in that region. The founding of this FabLab is equally exciting. It demonstrates that the activities of the AMTS do not impact only on the interests of big business. The benefits are equally extended to small, medium and micro-enterprises (SMMEs), which is one of the focus areas of government in terms of stimulating economic growth and employment creation. This technological revolution could open the door to solving local community problems by developing new products or starting new businesses, which will lead to wealth creation. Government and the Department of Science and Technology in particular support these types of initiatives to enhance innovation in our country. The ability of the FabLab technology to allow people to create the objects they desire, and the kind of world they want to live in, will make a further contribution towards bridging the innovation chasm. It will provide mechanisms and facilities that South Africans could use to manufacture products resulting from their own innovation. Perhaps most importantly it has the potential to reverse the current trend of South African innovations ending up in foreign countries due to inadequate support structures for innovators at home. The DST strongly endorses the plan to use the FabLab as a training facility to teach students, innovators and entrepreneurs to use the tools available to manufacture almost anything. Most importantly, it will support the DST’s commitment to building a strong scientific human capital base in this country. It is only with appropriately skilled human resources that we will have sustainable economic growth. This also compliments other government initiatives that are in place to stimulate innovation, including the Godisa incubators and the Tshumisano Technology Stations which provides a multi-disciplinary advisory centre for aspiring entrepreneurs. The DST is also developing programmes on Nanotechnology research, which is a frontier programme that is envisaged to have a significant impact on manufacturing and manufacturing technologies. As much as our government through the DST is committed to enhancing the technological capability of our country, unless this is done through strong partnerships our success rate will always be limited. I therefore encourage you to forge partnerships in your areas of activity in order to ensure that together, we achieve our respective goals. The challenge will be to ensure that this good concept and all the potential it holds does become available to ordinary men and women who currently are economically active in the so-called second economy, but who could, with the right kind of technological support break through their present barriers and become valuable participants in the mainstream economy. In the process wealth and jobs will be created. Only then we will be able to truly say that our technologies have made a real difference. Michelangelo needed a wall to do his painting. But he also needed scaffolding, brushes and other paraphernalia to depict his images much more elaborately and lucidly. The emergence of fabrication laboratories has given us the wall. What will we capture on it? Will we industriously paint the picture of an empowered and poverty- free society, a society of inventers?
It is therefore my pleasure to say the following as I declare this Fabrication Laboratory officially founded: ‘Like water that cascades through the ravine let us flow and resist fixation. Let us cause the poor in particular and society in general, to benefit from this new wave of technology’
I thank you. Issued by: Department of Science and Technology
28 June 2005
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