Opinion
A practical map from Nigerian laboratories to Nigerian markets Book review:
From Laboratory to Marketplace: Bridging Industry and Academia for Innovation-Led Development, with Lessons for Nigeria and Africa, by Adesoji Adesugba.
Foreword by Engr. Umar Buba Bindir, PhD. [Publisher], 2026. [Number] pages.
Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions.
By Dr Tinuke Temitope
Every year, Nigerian universities and research institutes produce thousands of theses, papers and prototypes. Every year, the country imports machinery, medicines, processed foods and technologies that its own scientists could, in principle, have helped to make. Few people would dispute that something is broken between the laboratory and the marketplace. What has been missing is a clear account of what exactly is broken, why, and what can be done about it. Adesoji Adesugba’s From Laboratory to Marketplace sets out to provide that account, and it largely succeeds.
The author is well placed to try. His career has taken him through the Nigeria Customs Service, the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission, the Bureau of Public Enterprises and the leadership of the Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority, and now through the organised private sector and the university classroom. He writes, as Engr. Umar Buba Bindir observes in his foreword, as someone who has “lived in all three strands of the triple helix” of government, industry and academia. That breadth is the book’s greatest strength.
A book in five movements
The argument unfolds in five parts. The first sets out the problem and the ideas needed to understand it, from national innovation systems to the “valley of death” in which promising inventions die between the laboratory bench and the first customer. The second travels the world: the American model of university patenting and venture capital, Europe’s applied research institutes such as Germany’s Fraunhofer, the developmental states of Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, and emerging economies from Brazil to Morocco and Ethiopia. Each comparison ends with a frank assessment of what Nigeria can borrow and what it cannot.
The third part turns to Nigeria, and it is here that the book is most valuable. The author assembles the scattered evidence on Nigerian research spending, patents, institutions, laws and finance into a coherent picture, and explains the barriers that keep research on the shelf: promotion systems that reward publications over use, uncertain ownership of inventions, weak intermediaries, firms with little capacity to absorb new technology, and a fragmented institutional landscape in which no single body is responsible for seeing an idea through. The fourth part examines the instruments that make commercialisation work, including technology transfer, intellectual property and finance for the riskiest stages of development. The fifth draws everything together in a ten-year road map.
Stories that teach
What lifts the book above a policy report is its use of Nigerian cases. It opens with a proposal, which the author received as head of NEPZA, to turn the University of Abuja into a knowledge-based free zone; the idea met no opposition, yet lapsed because no institution owned the final decision.
The story of Niprisan, the sickle-cell medicine developed from traditional knowledge by the National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development, shows how a genuine Nigerian invention can stall for want of a capable industrial partner, and how a second licence can revive it. The chapter on bridges under construction follows initiatives still being built: the TETFund National Research Fair, the TETFund/NACCIMA partnership, the 2026 Nigeria Prize-winning GenMRI software for faster MRI scanning, and a promising refinery catalyst developed at Ahmadu Bello University from Nigerian kaolin, for which the Dangote refinery is the natural first customer.
The author’s own reflections, drawn from his years at the ports, in investment promotion and in the economic zones, give these chapters a voice that academic studies rarely have.
His account of watching fully built machinery come off the ships at Apapa and Tin Can Island, and of factories in Asia running processes that Nigerian workers could easily have mastered, stays with the reader.
A toolkit as well as an argument
The book is unusually practical. It includes a model university intellectual property policy, an invention disclosure form, a licence term sheet, a worked valuation of a Nigerian technology, a proposed financing facility with five funding windows for the valley of death, and a detailed design for a national network of research-to-commercialisation hubs on the Brazilian EMBRAPII model, in which public funders, industry and universities each bear a share of the cost of every project.
The ten-year road map gives each reform a lead institution, a timetable, indicative costs and a risk register, and, importantly, a fallback route: the reforms that can begin now, under existing laws and institutions, even if the proposed National Research and Development Fund is delayed. Vice-chancellors, directors of research, chambers of commerce and legislators will all find material they can put to use.
F
rom my own work in skills and technology development, I was particularly glad to see the weight the book gives to people: to graduates placed in firms, to the training of professional technology transfer staff, to protected research time, and to the young Nigerian researchers at home and abroad whose talent, as the author insists, was never the problem.
Reservations
No book on this subject can be complete, and this one is candid about its limits. Nigeria’s data on research outcomes are thin and often dated, and the author is careful to say where a figure is disputed or rests on a single source; the price is that some of the Nigerian evidence remains provisional. The account of what became of past Nigeria Prize winning works, for example, is drawn from the public record rather than from the inventors themselves, and the author openly invites corrections for a second edition. Some readers will also note that the author holds positions in several of the institutions he discusses, from the Abuja Chamber of Commerce to the TETFund/NACCIMA Joint Technical Committee; he declares these interests clearly, and his assessments of those institutions are not uncritical, but readers should weigh them accordingly.
Finally, the road map’s ambition depends heavily on political continuity and on a funding commitment that has not yet been enacted. The book’s fallback route is a welcome acknowledgement of that risk.
Verdict
From Laboratory to Marketplace is the most comprehensive treatment I know of the gap between Nigerian research and Nigerian enterprise, and the most practical. It is written in clear, accessible prose, without jargon, and it combines international evidence, Nigerian cases and the experience of a practitioner who has worked on both sides of the divide. It deserves to be read by policy makers and legislators, university and research leaders, investors and industrialists, and by every young Nigerian researcher who wants to see an idea leave the laboratory. Its closing message is one that all of us in the organised private sector should take to heart: the knowledge is there, the talent is there, and the market is there. What remains is to build the connection.
Disclosure: The reviewer works with the author at the Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry, where he is Chairman and Founder of the BEST Centre, which she heads.
Dr Tinuke Temitope is [Deputy Director General] of the Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Head of the ACCI Business Entrepreneurship, Skills and Technology (BEST) Centre, Abuja.