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April 28, 2006
Innovation in Africa conference: speech notes
I was in Jozi for another conference earlier this week. Marcusevans asked me to chair and speak, something I relish doing as it gets me to interact with a wide variety of people.
As promised to the delegates, here is a reference to things I spoke about, and some things I didn't get to discuss, but think relevant to the topic at hand.
My slides have been saved in a pdf format to retain layout and font, and is available here [4mb pdf, right-click and save-as]. You can also have a copy of the text of my speech in MS Word here.
There are a bunch more references and articles that I have which are available in the extended portion of this posting below.
A book all people involved in innovation should read: The Sources of Innovation, by Eric Von Hippel.
Another book about the selling ideas, a key skill, is Free Prize Inside, by Seth Godin.
Relevance to Africa
In discussion during the conference, I spoke a few people about the relevance of innovation to Africa, to shift the thinking away from high-tech to appropriate tech (which is not to say that the latest WiMax network isn't relevant, but rather, let's not get seduced by the technology). I did a speech in 2003 that keyed into this theme (excerpt here).
EF Schumacher wrote about this in Small is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered. A classic. An example of appropriate technology meeting up with business model innovation is this company, KickStart. Their tagline is "Tools to End Poverty". (I can't believe Chuck Norris pops up here too, only because he has an organisation with a similar name!)
An interesting document that talks to this theme is Poverty Alleviation as a Business [4.4MB pdf]. This gives some interesting insight into the approach. Of course this also relates to CK Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid [pdf].
Regarding business model innovation, I referenced a quote from John Seely Brown in my talk. I got it from this article [pdf], a useful lens on something that product innovators forget.
Posted by sdehaast at April 28, 2006 11:43 AM Posted to articles & talks