The essence of the Research and Development Portfolio of the CSIR is to support the “good health” of the institutional research and innovation activities from strategic basic research at the one end to the point of transfer to commercial or public good application at the other. This covers:
- Self-initiated directed research, whose intended beneficiaries must be South African society and its economy, funded primarily from Parliamentary Grant.
- Contract research commissioned by a variety of paying customers in the public and private sectors.
A fundamental challenge is to engender a symbiosis rather than an antipathy between responding to a public mandate [contract with society] and pursuing market opportunity as a necessary and complementary business imperative. The latter is primarily characterised by existing market demand whereas the former is most aptly characterised by market failure at various levels of the national economy.