AfricaLive.net talks to Prof. Nicola Kleyn, Dean of the Gordon Institute of Business Science University of Pretoria, about the role of business schools in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Prof Kleyn highlights some of the challenges facing business schools and African higher education in general on the path to ensuring Africa is an active participant in the future of innovation.
“How do we work with business to confront and navigate major technological disruption?
How do we do that in a continent where we can’t assume that the demands and challenges of the third industrial revolution have already been met?
If we are not alert to the way that technology is being rolled out globally, then in Africa we will find ourselves only being consumers of these technologies. That would represent a missed opportunity to be part of the global value chains that are associated with actually producing and delivering these technologies.
You can’t set up an insolated think tank to deal with this. You need to embed it across curricula. This is hard in institutions where academia is seen as having the answers, I think the role of academia is to ensure that we are asking absolutely the right questions and to be working towards finding those answers”
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