Inventive or innovative?

By Leon Engelbrecht for Gartner
Johannesburg, 19 Jun 2007

Gartner predicts that in eight years, IT engineered for developing economies will drive 20% of disruptive IT innovations worldwide.

"Innovation doesn't come from a laboratory. It comes from solving real life problems and responding to everyday needs, regardless of how sophisticated the market might be, with the ultimate goal of enriching people's lives," says Gartner research director Sandy Shen.

"In our increasingly customer-centric world, we are moving away from the traditional view of innovation, as internally managed and R&D focused."

Shen argues developing nations are adopting innovation and technology faster than mature markets for three reasons. Firstly, the relative lack of legacy systems enable them to leapfrog technology and commercialise it faster, making them ideal test beds.

Secondly, in highly constrained environments, which might include poor infrastructure and low affordability, there is an acute need for products that can serve the local market better, rather than products designed for the developed world. For example, mobile phones that require less power and have built-in connectivity are more suitable for emerging markets than PCs. They are also cheaper than PCs and more adaptable to the emerging market environment.

Finally, emerging countries such as China and India have the ambition to lead the IT industry in the global market, and innovation is their only way to compete globally.

Local view

World Wide Worx MD Arthur Goldstuck buys into the thesis but says the argument confuses invention with innovation.

"There's a big difference between being inventive in the way you do business and innovative in the kind of products you develop. These do not represent the same kind of innovation, and can't be placed on the same continuum.

"The former is a hallmark of business in the developing world, the latter of business in the industrialised world," Goldstuck observes. "As a result of the driving forces behind each of these, it is not possible to transfer one type of innovation to another market.

"The most dramatically disruptive technology in SA was the cellphone itself, but that was an import. What SA did to the cellphone, however, was enormously disruptive here and everywhere else in the world: the concept of prepaid airtime was introduced here, and has changed the face of the cellular industry, bringing cellphones within reach of every second person in the developing world (compared to fixed-line phones which have not even reached every hundredth person).

"Prepaid airtime was a rare but dramatic example from SA of just this process occurring," he adds. "SMS applications and their successors, instant messaging applications, are likely to be one area in which South African developers will continue to show the way."

Imaginative applications

Multimedia Solutions operations director Riaan Groenewald says the company's approach to MMS marketing has pricked up ears abroad where the technology is still seen as a marketing solution in search of a problem.

"When used inventively, MMS is quite a disruptive technology that will cause people to rethink the mediums they use and the way they go about reaching their customers."

According to Groenewald, MMS makes e-ticketing easy, cost-effective and nearly fool- and theft-proof. He says it can also be used in education to send lectures and textbook or encyclopaedia extracts to students in rural areas.

In the context of the 2010 Soccer World Cup, it can be used as a translation service. "Users can even hear the correct pronunciation. Its application is only limited by our imagination."