Heritors Labs – the Launchpad for Ghanaian Research and Innovations

Heritors Labs, RISA Funded Project Milestones

• The RISA Fund facilitated the formation of the Ghana Research and Innovation Support Programmes Coordinating Office (GRISPCO), a stakeholder-owned private organisation to coordinate functions within the research and innovation community.
• Developed standard operating procedures, programmes, and platforms for the GRISPCO centre.
• Organised a discovery round table on research and innovation support programmes in Ghana.

About Heritors Labs Limited, RISA Funded Project

Heritors Labs Limited is a game-changing product development house, software engineering enclave, research centre, and innovation service hub with a vision to create experiences that evolve smarter fulfilments and deliver wins for people, systems, and communities.

The main objective of the RISA Fund was to provide technical capacity, frameworks, and tools to the established Programmes Coordinating Office (PCO), to deepen access to research ecosystem support programmes and create critical linkages amongst networks for the Ghana Innovation and Research Centre (GIRC). The PCO was established by the Ghanaian Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology, and Innovations, to support the transformation of research output and innovations into industrial products and services.

Stakeholder Engagements

Key stakeholders were engaged in different sessions including a discovery round table to share and contribute ideas on research and innovation support programmes in Ghana. The round table was a platform for stakeholders to network and have a better understanding of the schemes and programmes set up to support researchers in the country.

We organised a discovery round table discussion for about forty stakeholders and ended up having over seventy-four stakeholders attending. The response was very overwhelming. We had enlightening discussion sessions at the round table attended by key stakeholders including, Mr. Oliver Boachie, technical advisor to the Minister, Ministry of Environment, Science Technology and Innovation, and representatives from the Office of the President and Federal Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) among others.

Ghana Research and Innovation Support Programmes Coordinating Office

The partners consented to form the Ghana Research and Innovation Support Programmes Coordinating Office (GRISPCO). This stakeholder-owned private organisation will coordinate functions within the research and innovation community.

We want to transcend political administrations that is why we took that approach to make it ecosystem owned. Key here is signing an MOU with the government and all relevant stakeholders to ensure we have stakeholder buy-in and mandate to play a central coordinating role in the research and innovation ecosystem. An operational framework and a coordinating workstream identifying the goal, vision, mission and objectives of GRISPCO was created. It was a smart decision to have GRISPCO. We look forward to deepening the level of engagement and expanding the activities that GRISPCO can embark on to drive research innovation programmes across Ghana.

Development of Standard Operating Procedures and Information Portal

To guide the operations of the GRISPCO, standard operating procedures (SOPs) were developed. This elicited an expression of interest from institutions to adopt SOPs for their operations, an example is University of Environment and Sustainable Development in Ghana.

Within three months, we were able to put together not less than eight SOPs and a policy that an investor or institution can utilise, to drive and push forward the quality of its research and innovation. That is something that may not have happened if this programme didn’t come to fruition.

To create awareness on the SOPs, Heritors Labs worked with a lead publicist from an advertising agency to convert the SOPs into explainer videos that would be used to sensitise personnel at GRISPCO. Organisations wanting to adopt the SOPs can use the videos as a training manual or tool for its staff.

An information/website portal was created for GRISPCO, to ensure stakeholders easily access information on existing support programmes in Ghana.

We have the website that coordinates research and innovation support programmes. There was nothing like that before in the entire ecosystem. The platform is updated daily with information about research and innovation that people can access. There is research data of about one-hundred scientists in Ghana, that we are about to upload on our website after we have signed an MOU with them. By doing this we will give them the necessary impetus on accessibility and visibility that they would need in exposing their work.

Thank You RISA! We created something unique in Ghana. Touching GRISPCO is touching the whole research and innovation ecosystem in Ghana. We are grateful to the RISA and Chemonics team, you have been very good. Whatever success we have you share in it, because you contributed meaningfully to whatever we did.