2 October 2008
The International Conference on "South-South Cooperation for Technology Transfer and Development for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)", jointly organised by the National Science Foundation and the National Science and Technology Commission of Sri Lanka and the Centre for Science and Technology of the Non-Aligned and Other Developing Countries (NAM S&T Centre) was held from 18-22 August 2008.
One of the main outcomes of the confernece was the "Colombo Declaration", which included a specific recommendation for the role of business incubation in technology transfer: "Governments should initiate the development of Technology/Business Incubators, where not available. For capacity building the resources available with infoDev of World Bank could be utilized. [The] www.idisc.net portal could be linked with the proposed national technology transfer facility."
Mr. Balachandran from the Vellore Institute of Technology Technology Business Incubator, an infoDev grantee and Incubation Asia member presented a paper on "The Role of Business Incubation Systems to facilitate Technology Transfer". The paper presents a framework for exploring the possibility of using Business Incubation systems for facilitating Technology Transfer among SMEs under the South-South Cooperation umbrella.