A dream reborn

There's a movie on circuit currently, called “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”, wherein the hotel owner dreams of making the Marigold the greatest, most glorious establishment around. Never mind that it's falling apart and nothing works; he sees the hotel as it could be, and remains almost annoyingly upbeat regardless of every setback. This, until circumstance threatens to quash his dream permanently, and he faces the possibility of losing everything he's worked for, and far worse, the vision of a future that will now never be realised.

Ironically, it's this final step that would have established a local manufacturing sector, created green jobs, and given SA a unique, future-looking product.

Lezette Engelbrecht, online features editor, ITWeb

It's always tragic when a dream dies, even more so when it's a collective dream - one watched over and anticipated by scores of silent supporters. So it was with news of the Joule's shelving last week, with parent company Optimal Energy announcing that lack of funding had put a halt to the home-grown electric vehicle's commercialisation.

In the case of the hotel movie, fate obviously intervenes at the last minute and the dream is restored. But real life doesn't have the luxury of audience-pleasing endings, and Optimal Energy had to reconsider what it would do with seven years of IP and several completed prototypes.

Plans for the Joule stretch back nearly a decade, to 2005, when the engineers at Optimal Energy began work on what would be the continent's first electric vehicle. After an initial showing at the Paris Motor Show, in 2008, the Joule made a celebrated debut at the Geneva Motor Show, in 2010, and several improvements and versions later, had planned to begin mass production. Optimal CEO Kobus Meiring's message at Geneva was one of embracing the opportunity “to position Joule uniquely in an awakening market”.

Now, the company has to eviscerate its creation and redeploy the Joule's innards into something else (it eventually settled on electric buses). Marketing director Diana Blake says they had always been going from one step to the next - from prototype to prototype - with chunks of funding enabling each stage. But when the time came to make the transition from demo model to market vehicle, the funding train ran out of steam. Ironically, it's this final step that would have established a local manufacturing sector, created green jobs, and given SA a unique, future-looking product.

Blake says they realised a few months ago the company was in limbo and simply surviving, and had to make a plan to use the Joule technology in something else. Close to 10 years of research and development, government investments, and four perfectly good prototype models later, and the R9 billion and two-and-a-half years needed to make the dream a reality proved too big an ask.

What's particularly disappointing about the Joule's mothballing is that the concept symbolised everything we're constantly being told about dreaming big and investing in local potential. It had all the ingredients of a success story: innovative technology, entrepreneurship, competitive differentiation, buy-in from government, a growing market. Ultimately, however, it failed to secure a key requirement - the backing of a big-name partner to get it to market.

Is this really the message SA wants to send to fledgling individuals and companies trying to introduce innovative products? That unless you have insane amounts of money and an established name you can't succeed? It seems government was ready to fund all the work and development up to a point, but when push came to shove it pulled out, essentially ensuring a concept it helped nurture for years was stillborn.

Some would argue that starting an auto manufacturing sector from scratch was always going to be an ambitious goal, but what happened to Joule is part of a far larger pattern. It's that SA isn't willing to stick its neck out for its own entrepreneurs. We reside in a continent where there is abundant opportunity: Africa houses nearly a billion people, many of which still don't have access to basic services like clean water and electricity. Yet, SA, as a leading African economy, seems to be either ignoring these possibilities or investing far too few resources in realising them.

Take the massive ICT infrastructure across Africa that's just sitting there waiting to be tapped. More people have cellphones than flushing toilets, yet how many local mobile or Internet services companies are truly exploring that potential? In a recent Brainstorm article, tellingly called “A nation of naysayers”, Motribe co-founder Nic Haralambous notes that local developers are more interested in safe, secure jobs than being innovative and taking risks.

And if one looks at the investment climate in SA, perhaps it's not surprising. According to an FNB and Gordon Institute of Business Science study, the country's financial and operating environment is not exactly welcoming to entrepreneurs. Regulations, policies, and access to capital are all inhibiting factors, and start-ups generally fail at a rate of about nine in 10 in the first two years of operation. Is SA doomed to be a place where dreams are born but can't grow?

If all this seems a little gloomy, then perhaps we can take heart in Optimal Energy's tactic of redirecting its technology into a new venture. Of course it's a considerable setback, because they now have to start the whole process of finding partners, raising funding, and building prototypes all over again. On the other hand, it speaks of a spirit of perseverance that is essential in keeping a business afloat in today's world.

It's become a clich'e to say there's opportunity in failure, particularly after the ups and downs of the global recession. But clearly, not enough of one to make SA value the lessons found in starting over. In the FNB/GIBS study, authors point to the low tolerance in South African society for entrepreneurs who fail. “In other parts of the world, like Silicon Valley, for example, entrepreneurial failure is a badge of honour that is actually sought after by the financing community. In the words of typical Silicon Valley venture capitalists: 'When we look at a funding application, a very important factor for us is whether the entrepreneur has failed before, because the greatest learnings on how to run a business come from having failed before'.”

So, to return to our determined hotel owner in “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”, whenever he is faced with a seemingly insurmountable challenge, he quips back with the saying: “It will all be okay in the end, and if it's not okay, it's not the end.” Perhaps this is a slightly contrived philosophy with which to console the Optimal Energy team. But it's one they're embracing wholeheartedly nonetheless. Best of luck to you all for round two.