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A Foundation for What Lies Ahead

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As you flip through this newsletter and take stock of what enlivens this issue: our Call for Proposals, the success of National Innovation Challenge and the National Innovator Hall of Fame events, the coordination of the National Research Week, World Intellectual Property Day, our growing engagement with Horizon Europe, the Regional Innovation Challenge, and the steady work of our Space Unit, I find myself, this time, looking less, (certainly not undermining) at what these achievements represent in themselves, and more at what they have been consistently preparing us for.

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In 1992, the Mauritius Research Council opened its doors with the existing means and profile. Few at the time could have predicted where that beginning would lead. Over the years that followed, patiently and often quietly, it built something that mattered: a culture in which research was funded, innovators were heard, and ideas were given room to grow.

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The institution was reconstituted as the Mauritius Research and Innovation Council in 2019, and following this, it found its stride, earning, initiative by initiative, a measure of trust that Mauritians rarely extend lightly, as an apex funding agency, and also through outreach efforts such as the National Innovation Challenge and the National Innovator Hall of Fame, and through its contribution to Mauritius' standing in the Global Innovation Index. It is noteworthy that the institution also established Mauritius as a Space faring island. The list of initiatives and achievements are non-exhaustive. I say this with pride, but also with a clear sense of proportion. What the Council achieved over these years was never intended as a destination. It was, from the outset, a foundation, and a necessary one, for something larger still.

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That something larger is now taking shape. The Mauritius Research and Innovation Council is transitioning into the National Research and Innovation Institute (NRII), an institution conceived with a sharper and considerably wider mandate, one that will be called upon to serve as “the ultimate apex Institution dealing with Research and Innovation for Mauritius”. Where the Council has funded projects, the Institute will be asked to shape and lead research ecosystems. Where the Council has supported innovators, the Institute will be expected to position Mauritius itself as an innovation nation on the regional and international stage. This is, without exaggeration, the more consequential chapter, and it is one in which the truly defining achievements for research and innovation in this country still lie ahead.

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I want to be unambiguous about where the staff of the MRIC stand on this transition: firmly and enthusiastically behind it. Every member of this institution, across every unit and every programme represented in this newsletter, is contributing, with the same dedication that built the Council over thirty-four years, to laying the groundwork for the NRII to succeed from its very first day. We see ourselves not as custodians of a legacy to be preserved unchanged, but as its first builders, honoured to hand over the foundation we have built to an institution capable of carrying it so much further.

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If there is a message, I hope this editorial leaves you with, it is this: the story you read about in these pages is not one of an institution reaching its peak. It is the story of an institution that spent thirty-four years earning the right to be succeeded by something greater, and of a team that is proud, without reservation, to help build what comes next.