In an ever-changing world, science helps decrypt the dynamics at work, helps us understand them and come up with solutions to assist with change in a more sustainable manner, which could not be achieved without appropriate knowledge, technology levers, and innovations developed on a large scale.
We need to invent solutions that facilitate knowledge, the understanding of complex issues and communication, and which help us live better with less.
Technology transfers are not the only solution. Solutions have long been invented in countries in the Global South, based on traditional knowledge or born of the need to come up with responses in highly challenging environments. Good ideas, often the outcome of research, are spread.
Since science provides knowledge of contexts, challenges and levers, and enables break-through innovations with a greater social impact for technologies and services, it can help reconcile economic growth, human development and the protection of ecosystems; it helps create solutions that enable the design and development of sustainable development.
Science can fulfil this role all the better when it is open and involves complementary partners the full length of the research/innovation chain. Open science is another way of approaching science, bringing on-board partners to ‘co-research’ very early on in the process. It means it remains in tune with priority requirements and respond to challenges in an optimal manner.
Today, we need to support this process of opening up science to society, in countries in the North and in the South, to support research communities in the Global South, open laboratories up to society, stimulate creativity and support the building of innovation capacities.
At IRD, mobilising research means ensuring the economic value of research (technology transfer) but it also means open science, ‘research together’, to strengthen research’s contribution to society.