Browsing by Author "Cutland, Clare"

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    Consensus study on factors influencing the academic entrepreneur in a middle income country's university enterprise
    Farrell, Alfred; Ashton, James ; Mapanga, Witness; Joffe, Maureen; Chitha, N.; Beksinska, M.; Chitha, Wezile; Coovadia, Ashraf; Cutland, Clare; Drennan, Robin; Kahn, Kathleen; Koekemoer, Lizette; Micklesfield, Lisa; Miot, Jacqueline; Naidoo, Julian; Papathanasopoulos, Maria; Sive, Warrick; Smit, J.; Tollman, Stephen; Veller, Martin; Ware, Lisa; Wing, Jefferey; Norris, Shane
    Purpose– This study aims to ascertain the personal characteristics of a group of successful academic entrepreneurs in a South African university enterprise and the prevalent barriers and enablers to their entrepreneurial endeavour. Design/methodology/approach– The authors used a Delphi process to identify and rank the characteristics, enablers, barriers and behaviours of entrepreneurial academics, with a Nominal Group Technique applied to establish challenges they encounter managing their enterprise and to propose solutions. Findings– Perseverance, resilience and innovation are critical personal characteristics, while collaborative networks, efficient research infrastructure and established research competence are essential for success. The university’s support for entrepreneurship is a significant enabler, with unnecessary bureaucracy and poor Purpose– This study aims to ascertain the personal characteristics of a group of successful academic entrepreneurs in a South African university enterprise and the prevalent barriers and enablers to their entrepreneurial endeavour. Design/methodology/approach– The authors used a Delphi process to identify and rank the characteristics, enablers, barriers and behaviours of entrepreneurial academics, with a Nominal Group Technique applied to establish challenges they encounter managing their enterprise and to propose solutions. Findings– Perseverance, resilience and innovation are critical personal characteristics, while collaborative networks, efficient research infrastructure and established research competence are essential for success. The university’s support for entrepreneurship is a significant enabler, with unnecessary bureaucracy and poorPurpose– This study aims to ascertain the personal characteristics of a group of successful academic entrepreneurs in a South African university enterprise and the prevalent barriers and enablers to their entrepreneurial endeavour. Design/methodology/approach– The authors used a Delphi process to identify and rank the characteristics, enablers, barriers and behaviours of entrepreneurial academics, with a Nominal Group Technique applied to establish challenges they encounter managing their enterprise and to propose solutions. Findings– Perseverance, resilience and innovation are critical personal characteristics, while collaborative networks, efficient research infrastructure and established research competence are essential for success. The university’s support for entrepreneurship is a significant enabler, with unnecessary bureaucracy and poor access to project and general enterprise funding an impediment. Successful academic entrepreneurs have strong leadership, and effective management and communication skills. Research limitations/implications– The main limitation is the small study participant group drawn from a single university enterprise, which complicates general disability. The study supported the use of Krueger’s (2009) entrepreneurial intentions model for low- and middle-income country (LMIC) academic entrepreneur investigation but proposed the inclusion of mitigators to entrepreneurial activation to recognise contextual deficiencies and challenges. Practical implications– Skills-deficient LMIC universities should extensively and directly support their entrepreneurial academics to overcome their contextual deficiencies and challenging environment. Originality/value– This study contributes to addressing the paucity of academic entrepreneur research in LMIC contexts by identifying LMIC-specific factors that inhibit the entrepreneur’s movement from entrepreneurial intention to entrepreneurial action.
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    Equitable access to vaccines: exploring the role of accessability, acceptability, affordabilityand availability with a focus on COVID-19
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Schwalbe, Nina; Cutland, Clare
    The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis brought to light many challenges, including “vaccine equity”. In other words, it raised the question: was the distribution of vaccines “fair”? While, on the one hand, there have been unprecedented advances in the science and technologies associated with vaccines, including extraordinary speed and scale-up of manufacturing, there were also significant barriers related to rollout and reaching those most at risk of severe COVID-19. These challenges have disproportionately affected low- and middle-income countries and low-income populations in high-income countries. Building on evidence from other vaccine preventable diseases, this thesis describes the challenges and opportunities concerning vaccine access with a focus on production and distribution (the “supply side”). It explores access using a “4A's” framework to conceptualise the components of access to medicines: affordability, availability, acceptability, and accessibility. The research identifies a range of access policy levers across the end-to-end process of vaccine research, development, and rollout (affordability, acceptability, accessibility, acceptability); reviews these levers as they apply to vaccine manufacturing (affordability, availability); explores the lever of financial incentives to increase coverage (acceptability); and explores the potential of using precision public health to improve vaccine impact by targeting vaccine distribution to groups most risk (accessibility). This thesis identifies several policy and program interventions ranging from regulatory harmonisation and intellectual property sharing, to using precision public health to target the delivery of vaccines to those most at risk. It also shows that while financial incentives may help, governments cannot “buy” coverage. It proposes that in future, vaccine development and deployment should start and end with a “4A’s” strategy and provides practical recommendations on how that can be achieved