Johannesburg, 14 Nov 2016
Failure is important and partnerships are crucial in building entities that are sustainable and innovative, ICT business experts said at a Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2016 panel discussion in Cape Town earlier this year.
The panel discussion: 'Gearing for tomorrow's organisations today: A digitally agile culture for a successful workforce', was hosted by Gartner ITxpo sponsor MTN Business. Focused on the changing demands of digital businesses, the discussion unpacked issues around agility, innovation and the changing face and expectations of the workforce in the digital age.
Jeffrey Mann, event chair and analyst at Gartner, noted that profound changes were coming within the workplace, society and individuals. "We need to take our employees along with us, and have them to also be driving this change, and not have digital change be something that is done to them," he said.
Peter Alkema, CIO for Business Banking at FNB, said FNB had given its employees ownership of innovation in products, services and operations, and had paid out over R40 million in incentives to support this drive. "The continual reinvention of our culture is something we've driven from the top, and our business unit teams are able to work semi-autonomously and innovate, within our corporate governance," he said. However, a culture of innovation had to be inspired from the top. "For me, innovation is about leadership. The transactional style of leadership that we inherited from the military and the industrial revolution has to change. We have to move more to remove the bureaucracy and red tape to enable employees to deliver better work and better software that enables the business to innovate."
Roger Norton, head of Technology at Domestly, noted that start-ups were better at innovation. "When you have constraints on time and money, it forces you to focus on the value proposition you are taking to market and the business model around that," he said. "That laser focus around delivering value faster enables you to innovate faster. On the other hand, corporates have the wrong constraints - like bureaucracy."
Val Moodley, acting GM and head of Cloud Portfolio at MTN Business, said: "Corporates risk getting set in their ways in terms of how they do things. MTN has transformed itself in the past few years. One of the things we are finding is we cannot have core competencies in everything. So partnering with many companies who have those core competencies is important."
Alkema said: "In the banking sector, we've seen a flurry of banks partnering with incubator start-ups to support innovation and get access to that innovation."
Gys Kappers, CEO at Wyzetalk, said larger organisations today were accelerating their partnerships with smaller partners and suppliers. "We found that the general time to get into large organisations does take a lot of time, and there are a lot of compliance issues, but we see new willingness on the part of large enterprise to partner with smaller entities." Access to large enterprise and support from the industry helped innovators and start-ups to grow, he noted. Wyzetalk, which was one of the Aspiring Innovators showcased by Gartner and MTN at Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2015, had benefited from the platform provided by the opportunity, he said. "We pivoted our business focus, which coincided with our exposure at this event last year, and these factors contributed to our ability to grow 100% over the past eight months."
Failure was important on the road to innovation, the panelists said. Mann said in the US, a prevailing attitude among in investors was that a start-up had to have failed a few times before investors would be willing to put money into it.
Norton noted: "The thing about innovation is it requires failure. To do something innovative, you have to try things that haven't been done before, so there is a very good chance that some of those things are going to fail. For innovation to thrive, a 'safe to fail' environment must be created. A failure is a learning. Start-ups are going to fail - in 10 typical VCs, four will be complete write-offs, three to four will make some kind of money back, one will be pretty decent and make 5x returns, and one will make 10x to 100x returns. Finding that one is done by spreading wide, not deep."
MTN Business, through its various innovation programmes, developer challenges and new partner ecosystem programme, was aiming to encourage innovation and partner with successful innovators, said Moodley. "The idea is to create platforms created by corporates to allow young entrepreneurs to innovate, and test the solutions along with the corporate," she said. "Without the right culture in place, you won't achieve the impact and levels of innovation that are possible."
Share