Dear Innovation and Commercialisation Colleagues,

Before anyone accuses me of exaggeration, let me state clearly: during 2025, you have yet again set incredibly high standards that make us the benchmark in the sector.  You keep everything eventful, patented, moving, nutritiously fed, transported, printed, incubated, beautifully dressed in maroon, and safely housed in a homely and clean environment near a lush garden where near extinct and other plants are nurtured and protected.  And for all of that, I want to express my sincere gratitude.

To our Technology Transfer champions—thank you for assisting our researchers during 2025 to turn bright ideas yet again into brighter futures. You make innovation look effortless, even though we all know it often involves caffeine, courage, and the occasional crisis.

To the LaunchLab team - you raise start-ups like proud parents, guiding them from “What if…?” to “Look, it works!” Your patience and enthusiasm deserve its own award.  With 6 new spinout companies in 2025 and millions of rands in investment raised for our companies, we had a bumper year!  Well done!

To the Copyright, Trade Marks and Short Courses team - thanks for another year of keeping us between proper guard rails where it concerns copyright and trade mark usage and for navigating the jungle of online systems to make our short courses happen.  You are absolutely amazing.

To Transport Services - thank you for getting everyone safely where they needed to be this year, even when the rest of us are still figuring out where we are. You are the true navigators of campus chaos. Your Tetris skills when it comes to fitting thousands of cars into limited parking spaces are world class! 

To Food and Compliance - you kept us safe, fed, and sane in 2025. A heroic trio of responsibilities. Providing 1.2 million meals in 2025 with yet again zero food poisoning incidents is a fantastic achievement but making sure that our students have access to affordable and nutritious meals make you real superheroes on our campus!

To Residential Services - you completed another year of housing our students in a safe and clean home away from home for them. A thousand times thank you.  If there was a world cup for residential services, you would have been the champions!

To the Copy and Print and Courier team - the quiet tech magicians of our division. Papers appear, paper jams disappear, booklets emerge, banners materialize. If Hogwarts had a print shop, it would envy yours. 

To the Botanical Garden team - thank you for making our garden a place where plants thrive, visitors smile, and staff members occasionally remember to breathe.  You have done an amazing job this year and mastered the art of conservation, preservation, and determination and for that we have admiration.  You make our botanical garden a beautiful and meaningful place where any plant - bonsais, orchids, fynbos, welwitschias, pelargonium, oxalis and so many more - has a place and thrive.

And to the Rental Office - you provide a student experience like none other ensuring that they have all the caffeine they need to get through their A3’s, with a wide variety of food and snacks to choose from to get through the day and a relaxing post-exam movie or sport on the big screen.  You made us (again!) very proud this year.

And Factory 209 - a huge thank you for showcasing our campus and university and for bringing people and events to Stellenbosch. Walking into one of our world-class Maties stores or the botanical garden shop or ordering SU merch online is an amazing experience that is so unique to our campus.  Thank you for all the students you helped to find jobs in 2025, and for making it easy for researchers to consult to industry.  You are an incredible team!

Each of your offices brings something essential, and together you create a division that is not only efficient and dedicated, but also warm, collaborative, and wonderfully human.  Thank you for your hard work, your humour, your goodwill, and the countless ways you make the university better every single day.

I look so much forward to another year of working with you, making our university a prosperous and relevant institution with staff that live our values: excellence, compassion, equity, respect and accountability.  May you have a wonderful festive season and come back well rested and ready for 2026!

I appreciate you—deeply, genuinely, and with a smile.

Anita