Catalysing innovation and entrepreneurship

The Wits Innovation Centre, home of the prestigious $3 million endowed Angela and David Fine Chair in Innovation serves as a hub for the coordination of innovation activities and drives inspired entrepreneurial and innovative thinking across the University. The Centre works across disciplines, schools, faculties, institutions and sectors to bring the best minds, resources, technology and infrastructure to bear to create new knowledge, products and services, and to solve real-world problems. The Centre will be embedded in the Wits Innovation Hub and will coordinate and conduct teaching in Innovation and a broad range of events, activities and facilities.

The Wits Innovation Hub is being established in the old Flower Hall on West Campus. It will serve as a meeting place and co-working facility for Wits Innovators drawn from all faculties and disciplines. Staff and students will have a place to gather and co-create. It will be a venue for hackathons, meet-ups and other events. The Hub will also house maker-spaces and incubators.

The Wits Innovation Investment Fund provides an opportunity for Wits Alumni and others to invest in Wits innovations and start-ups. The Fund will provide seed funding and investments with the aim of growing successful spin-off companies from Wits research.

The Wits Anglo American Digital Dome, formerly the Wits Planetarium, is a groundbreaking, high-tech, multi-disciplinary digital research and innovation facility hosted by the School of Physics in the Faculty of Science at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Anglo American partnered with the University in 2022 to support the refurbishment, expansion, and digitalisation of the then 62-year-old Johannesburg Planetarium to revolutionise how we understand and experience science, art, and culture.

The current phase of the project will include the construction of a wing that will consist of content creation and digital studios, as well as the possibility of a Science and Technology Exploratorium. The Digital Dome will support the academic projects of teaching, research, innovation, postgraduate training, education, science engagement and community service, and will serve as a space for digital science exploration and discovery for data-intensive disciplines.  

One of the primary aims is to use Digital Dome as an immersive data visualisation facility for multi-disciplinary research, teaching and learning in areas such as astronomy, climate modelling, biology, paleo sciences, mining, artificial intelligence, and new avenues in the digital arts, making it a place where science, art, and culture intertwine.

Fetching and visualising data sets or simulations into the Dome software to foster new postgraduate training opportunities as Honours, MSc, and PhD projects are possible, supplementing existing research through academic publications, MSc, and PhD theses.  Various departments can utilise FreeDome, the inbuilt interactive STEAM educational resources for teaching and learning. It is possible to incorporate new resources running in the Unity framework incorporated to the Dome for a three-dimensional perspective of regular teaching aids in different fields.

New specialist incubators and business accelerators will be established to support start-ups spun from Wits research and innovation. These will include a Health-Tech Incubator in Parktown, a Fin-Tech Incubator in Braamfontein and a Rural- Tech Incubator at the Wits Rural Campus in Mpumalanga. Other physical and virtual incubators are also envisaged.

Building robust entrepreneurial ecosystems