Innovation on Trial

We put Innovation on Trial for Armed Robbery and Purgery ! – for stealing time and resources and for lying about innovation potential and progress.

A first in South Africa, this was a collaboration between SA Innovate Magazine, Future by Design, The Research Institute for Innovation and Sustainability (RIIS), Sense2Solve and Cexino, culminating in a 2 day conference held in October 2008 to examine the results and perceptions of innovation in the field.

Innovation is no longer a new business concept in South Africa. Many organisations have taken steps to become more innovative in the way they do business or develop their products and services. Yet, the outcome has not totally met expectations and a real return on investment is difficult to prove.

The conference took the form of a courtroom drama where both prosecution and defence called various witnesses from academia, commerce, government and the public sector to state their case of where innovation has been a success or where it has failed the organisation.

The conference program introduced the following speakers to the delegates:

  • Deputy Minister of Science and Technology – Derek Hanekom
  • Derek Wilcox – Dimension Data
  • Gidon Novic – Kulula.com
  • Mansoor Mohammed – Executive Director for Economic Development and Tourism for the City of Cape Town
  • Mr E Kieswetter – South African Revenue Service (SARS)
  • Professor Calie Pistorius of University of Pretoria
  • Dr Bernard Janse – Mondi
  • Nirvashnee Seetal – COFISA
  • Iain Bryant – Director Future by Design
  • Audrey Verhaeghe and Henra Mayer – RIIS
  • Itha Taljaard – Sense2Solve

At the end of the conference the delegates were asked to participate by acting as a jury to deliberate the issues and arrive at a verdict on each of the charges.

Overwhelmingly, the jury found that INNOVATION IS NOT GUILTY of the charges it was accused of at the beginning of the conference.

However, in mitigation of this verdict, the conference was unanimous in agreeing that Successful Innovation does not, and cannot, happen by itself, and without proper innovation management systems and processes, it has a high chance of failure or under-delivery at best.

It is in this area of Innovation Management that Future by Design assists clients.