On Tech Innovation in South Africa
by Tyler Reed
I’ve been wanting to share my thoughts around innovation for a while. It is a broad topic and I won’t be able to explore it entirely in this post. However I would like to make some key points on innovation in South Africa, and to some extent, Africa. In some way, consider this post a response to a post on how South Africans refuse to innovate, and love to imitate by Jason Adriaan.
Before I go into detail, I would like to state that I subscribe to the definition of innovation as defined by Douglas Merrill (former CIO of Google) which is:
- Incremental Innovation – Small changes to a process or system, for example evolution.
- Incremental Innovation with Side Affect(s) – Small changes to a process or system with side affects, for example the opposable thumb.
- Transformation Change – An introduction of a new process or system that fundamentally changes the way things work. Alternatively, a change to a process or system that has significant impact. For example Google’s introduction of the auction / pay per click model for online advertising.
Even though it is a few years old, I suggest watching a video on innovation by Douglas Merrill. It will certainly give you insight into innovation at Google (a few years back).
Firstly, the internet has brought about a wonderful opportunity, not only to South Africans, but to anyone around the world with access to it. It allows individuals and organisations to communicate and transact across borders with ease (compared to even 25 years ago). Therefore I don’t believe anybody should be discouraged from attempting to satisfy a need in a foreign market, if they have the ability and resources to do so.
Mark Shuttleworth was able to cure a global itch from his garage in Cape Town and it certainly paid off for him. I am extremely glad nobody discouraged him from focussing on Thawte, to rather focus on “African problems”. Otherwise he wouldn’t have had the capital to start Canonical, the company behind the Linux based operating system Ubuntu (now the most used Linux distribution globally).
Secondly, I agree that mobile has a larger presence in South Africa, Africa and the rest of the world. And if we go a step further, I also agree that smartphones have less penetration in Africa than feature phones. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t significant market opportunity in the smartphone space locally.
I think FNB has shown the above to be true by launching a mobile banking application for Android and iPhone. A move that has allowed them to tap into a market of around 250 000 people, and once the BlackBerry version is available that figure will be over 1 million. By 2014, it’s projected that 80% of South Africans will own smartphones. We all know how fast Android is growing.
I need not say much more, a good innovation focused towards future potential. Not everything needs to make complete sense today in order to make sense tomorrow. In fact many could argue that most innovation doesn’t seem to be innovation at first.
Thirdly, I think South Africans are innovators by nature. I could cite Elon Musk, but that won’t make my point. In fact, I’d like to make a different point. Innovation isn’t always cheap. Many large organisations see innovation as a tax, because innovation is often prone to trial and error. Innovation isn’t often achieved in the first iteration.
Therefore if we couple the lack of or intense requirement of resources (capital, skills, infrastructure, etc) and high failure rates within innovation, we can easily see why many people and organisations are prone to ignore their natural calling to innovate and take the safer option, which is to do what works (perhaps imitate?).
I personally don’t see anything wrong with imitating what works. Zynga is notorious for imitating and they haven’t done too bad (different topic though). Let us not forget that Facebook was not the first social network and Google was not the first search engine. I think that a market will justify a clone. In most cases the clone offers some kind of incremental innovation, albeit be it localised only (see Baidu).
Lastly, I think South Africa is heading in the right direction. We are slowly seeing changes in regulation and our internet infrastructure has made leaps and bounds over the last few years. I believe we are slowly making progress with regards to capital, although I would like to see more technology incubators. I think we have some great innovations out there, in the works and better yet – still to come!
Tyler, thank you for taking this and turning it from being pessimistic into optimistic, because I agree. Reading articles written by locals with negative views on our industry isn’t going to help anyone, but merely attempt to create hype – saddens me.
Imitation does not mean no innovation – Facebook and Google, as said, are great examples.
There are PLENTY of tech innovators in South Africa, the problem is that too many people in the scene measure everything against the bottom line; if something doesn’t generate lots of money, it’s not worth looking at. On top of this, because of the negative opinions, many innovators decide to innovate and keep quiet about it to avoid the potential of being slated.
Let’s hope that optimism can be used to encourage locals and give Internationals the feeling and knowledge that we’re proud South Africans, South Africans with amazing talent and the ability to innovate amongst the greatest.
Argumentum ad hominem has never really done anyone much good Chris. You won’t ever be able to be part of any meaningful discourse if you slam people for the tone in which they write, or whether they are optimistic enough or not.
-”Mark Shuttleworth was able to cure a global itch from his garage in Cape Town and it certainly paid off for him.”
I have massive respect for Elon and Mark but considering that we still reference them more than a decade later is indicative of how slow things are moving. Fundamo is a nice recent example, but yet again – few and far between.
-”However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t significant market opportunity in the smartphone space locally.”
Yes, this was actually my main point in the post. Cheap Android devices like the IDEOS (which will probably land in SA in the next 12 months) has really changed the game as you’ll be able to get them for less than R800. I wouldn’t bet too much on Blackberry for too much longer, but it also serves as a great example. But it’s very important that we realize that Africans will never be running around with the latest Apple product, and thus building products for them will never be solving uniquely African problems. I am hedging all my bets on Android at the moment.
-”Let us not forget that Facebook was not the first social network and Google was not the first search engine.”
Well to be honest I think the title of original post was misread. It just takes a second to look at the insane success of the likes of Tencent in China to see how well imitation works. My point was that the majority of South Africans are shooting blindly as they try to do as Americans do when creating products and choosing target markets. My point was that we need to understand what our people need from technology and do whatever is necessary to solve those problems. Mxit for example’s major success was how little data it was able to use to send messages, they literally stripped it down to the bone because they understood that in Africa the major concern was not all these rich media features, but rather how to cut costs on airtime use.
-”I think South Africa is heading in the right direction”
With tertiary institutions starting to mould their curriculum around Mobile and solving local problems through tech I have complete faith that we are in fact moving in the right direction. No doubt. But it’s happening rather slowly because not nearly enough minds are being applied to these problems – (considering for a second the huge shortage of developers in South Africa.)
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Anyways Tyler, thanks for taking the time to respond to my post. Always awesome to get a discussion like this to break into other areas.
Thanks for the reply Jason. As you know, I respect you and consider you intelligent. I don’t want to go back and forth – it never helps online. I agree with you on certain points.
However to some extent I think perhaps your post was more focussed on mobile, and I was covering innovation in general. I also responded largely to balance the title, and to an extent the tone, of your post. I know a title can sometimes just be a title, but I wanted offer a different perspective for those who might have felt offended or discouraged by it.
Like I said, we shouldn’t discourage anyone from focussing on any problem, whether it be local or foreign. Innovation will beget innovation and soon we will tackle African problems, and in most cases we already are – see World of Avatar’s mission (not excluding others too).
Awesome dude, I love these types of discussions but I think it will be better suited over a beer from here on in.
Keep well
J.