Cape Town - South African business leaders are more likely to encourage “creative behaviours” and seek new talent to drive innovation than their global counterparts.
The 2014 GE Global Innovation Barometer, which measured 26 countries and their perceptions of innovations, found that South African executives had an overwhelmingly positive perception of the importance of innovation.
Speaking yesterday at the opening of the seventh annual SA Innovation Summit, held at the Cape Town Stadium, mayor Patricia de Lille said the City of Cape Town was looking at ways of “entrenching innovation in what we do”.
Referring to Cape Town’s year as the World Design Capital, De Lille said the city was looking at ways of extending design thinking beyond 2014. This included joining the “tide of the data revolution” and looking at innovative initiatives, such as the open data policy.
Tim Schweikert, the president and chief executive officer of GE South Africa, said: “South Africa has long been known as a hotbed of innovation, from the invention of the world’s first oil-from-coal refinery to the first heart transplant.”
More recently, the focus had been on local innovation centres and organisations supporting entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises, such as the Silicon Cape Initiative.
“The drive for innovation across South Africa has never been greater.”
The survey found that 96 percent of South African executives agreed that collaboration was a “risk worth taking” to successfully innovate. More than 80 percent agreed that private companies needed to collaborate with state-owned enterprises.
Almost 70 percent encouraged creative behaviour in business to promote innovation. The barometer also picked up some of the challenges facing business.
Nearly a third of executives identified a lack of talent as a hindrance to innovation, while 28 percent said there was an incapacity to promote local innovations to an international market and 26 percent said a lack of investment and financial support would make innovation difficult.
The SA Innovation Summit, which ends on Friday, forms part of the official World Design Capital programme.
It includes workshops on entrepreneurship, policy and business innovation.
Cape Argus