Innovation simply for the sake of innovation does not help the world work better.
This is according to Abe Thomas, country GM for IBM SA, who notes that technological tools can be used to support innovation in myriad ways.
"Today we can do it differently. We can monitor, measure and manage nearly any physical system. We have the ability to collect and analyse real-time information on everything from hospitals systems to water quality in streams to customer preferences. We can listen to the citizens and hear their voices."
For Thomas, SA and Africa have to move beyond the traditional idea of "build it and they will come".
"Building out e-services to realise the e-government vision needs as much thought applied to the benefits it's going to provide as it does to the tools that are needed to deliver it," he said, stressing that a new mindset was needed to ensure innovation was applied in such a way that it met local needs and benefited SA and its people.
Thomas noted recent innovation successes in Africa, such as M-Pesa, the mobile money transfer and payment partnership between Vodafone UK and Safaricom in Kenya, which now has more than 27 million users, facilitates more than 200 million transactions per month, and is the precursor in changing the mobile banking landscape for Africa.
In SA, the National Planning Commission (NPC) used IBM technology - called Jam - to allow South Africans to inform the priorities of the NPC Plan. And the City of Tshwane has embraced crowdsourcing to reduce water wastage, by asking citizens to report water-related problems using a mobile app, he adds.
"These events may seem random, unrelated. But they are all instances of the same phenomenon - a new way in which organisations of all kinds are learning to compete in a new landscape. You can call it innovation at its best.
"Innovation that matters happens when we take the challenges in the fabric of society and address them. To do this, you really need to differentiate between types of innovation - and who will benefit from it. Essentially, different innovations speak to different people."
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