earn a good living by utilising the digital infrastructure that the government is investing in. Rules: This policy requires carefully crafted rules that ensure that there is fairness in the market place, that transactions are honoured, contracts and agreements are enforced, and that that scarce national resources such as spectrum and rights-of-way are fairly allocated. Things: For the Market to work efficiently and provide a platform for sellers and buyers, it needs infrastructure. It is our policy to judiciously use public funds to build state-ofthe art infrastructure at the best possible price and make it available to the largest possible number of people. 6.2.2 Money Money, technology and people are the drivers of the digital economy. By mirroring the physical entities used in business, such as bank notes, land titles, certificates and so on with digital equivalents, business can be assisted to move much faster since it is no longer limited by the time it physically takes to move a business item from one geographic location to another. We call the process of designing digital equivalents for physical things “informatisation.” Digitisation is the state where some thing, state or process in the real world can be completely simulated in the digital space – and of course this requires maintenance of exactly the same legal protections that exist in the physical world. To speed up business and accelerate prosperity, financial instruments, including cash, must be fully “informatised” and “digitised.” The digital and sharing economies are predicated on the legal recognition of digital contracts for digital analogues. Knowledge Economy: The Government will enable the move from minimal value economic activities such as the export of unfinished, raw materials to higher value economic activities such as manufacturing, export of finished goods and a digital economy. However, we recognise that high value artefacts such as phones or cars require a complex manufacturing ecosystem involving many interrelated manufacturers, so for instance, to create a computer it is necessary to have metal forming, plastic extrusion, integrated circuit design, silicon fabrication, silicon packaging, specialty bonding materials, microelectromechanical fabrication, circuit Ministry of ICT, Kenya layout, all the way up to operating system and application software development and hundreds of other specialty capabilities, each most likely in a different firm. This ecosystem of self-supporting and dependent industries and technologies is referred as the techonomy in this policy. This policy is designed to move the Kenyan ICT sector beyond mere trade in technological items, system deployment and software development. This move is intimately connected to our country’s capacity to do fundamental research in the physical sciences and our capacity to discover, engineer, realise, productise, and mass produce for global sale, technological artefacts, systems and processes. This will take time to achieve in full, but we start now, as follows: 1. Set Biennial Research Priorities: Every two years the Government will set five (5) research priority areas and provide funding to institutions of higher learning and private enterprise in the form of research grants, bonded scholarships, equipment purchase grants and postgraduate course recommendations and certifications in the priority areas. 2. Set Challenges: The government in consultation will define challenges and prizes in the priority areas. The solution to the challenges will become the intellectual property of the Government of Kenya, and may be licensed to indigenous Kenyan companies for productisation and manufacture. 3. Protect Intellectual Property: It is and will continue to be the policy of the government to provide robust protection and enforcement of Kenyan-developed intellectual property rights, and facilitate the rapid and advantageous acquisition of non-Kenyan intellectual property rights. 4. Provide Financial Incentives: Research and fundamental knowledge generation in Kenya has hitherto been the preserve of government agencies and institutions of higher learning. The Government believes that it is time for the private sector to get in on the act. 5. Innovation Hubs: The Government, in partnership with other arms will assist in the creation of innovation hubs across the country. Initially there will be 290 constituency innovation hubs which 18/37 November-2019