Southern Education and Research Alliance

The Southern Education and Research Alliance (SERA), since it was created by the University of Pretoria and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in 1999, has made considerable progress in fostering an academic, scientific and technical environment that benefits and enhances learning, development and innovation in South Africa. Cross-functional and cross-boundary task and project teams have been exploring synergies, built relationships and worked together to achieve objectives.The alliance partners have identified a number of areas of common interest, ability and capacity. Within these areas, themes have been identified and task teams have been put together to explore the possibility of co-operation. Education, research, market related activities, intellectual property and venturing are to be the focus of this co-operation. The teams have examined the current reality and market opportunities in each of these fields, and have developed proposals for a variety of activities, such as the joint offering of graduate programmes, the development of joint institutes or centres of expertise and ad hoc projects .

Venturing opportunities have been referred to SERA (Pty) Ltd, a company that was set up as the technology exploitation branch of the alliance. Its primary focus is the pursuit of the best, most profitable means of bringing technologies to the market through venturing, commercialisation and the protection and exploitation of intellectual property.

Mr. Johan Hattingh...
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