The SA Innovation Summit, hosted this month at the Cape Town Stadium, was a three day conference where innovators, entrepreneurs, government stakeholders, CEO’s, venture capitalists and funders from all across Africa were provided with a space to connect, cross collaborate, network and initiate.

One of the primary agenda’s tabled during the course of the summit was the subject of social innovation, what it means, how it functions, and how it could be applied to create an inclusive economy. The subject was unpacked and its various categories were identified as being composed of the following Inclusive Innovation, Impact Funding, Grass Roots Innovation, Enabling Innovation Ecosystems and Entrepreneurship.

One of the primary characteristics of social innovation is inclusive innovation, without inclusivity, social innovation may appear and function as any sort of other innovation. However, the question then becomes what qualifies inclusive innovation. Thabiso Mashaba of These hands GSSE, one of the guest panelists for the steam of Inclusive Innovation, was the first to attempt qualifying what defines inclusive innovation, and characterized it as collaborative innovation, specifically collaborating with marginalized cohorts of society to create unique solutions for their unique challenges. This practice he explained would in turn aggregate small economies as contributors to the national economy.  Tim Wucher of Dololo, an NGO that facilitates for an environment wherein various stakeholders engage for innovation, described inclusive innovation as the ability for anyone to innovate, in a way that connects policy makers to grassroot innovators, wherein spaces for the collaboration and communication between various stakeholders is fostered and institutionalized in systems of innovation. Spaces like these would not include panel discussions, where only subject specialists are afforded platforms, but would involve round table discussions where representatives from all strata are included, simply put imagine a discussion characterized by a local janitor, municipality representative, school teacher and a CEO.

However, what cannot be overlooked is the essentiality of trust, because even when the content is flawless, successful implementation relies solely on trust and without it inclusive innovation can never truly thrive. When innovation is inclusive,

Findings are that inclusive innovation is a point of departure an ideology of sort that prioritizes cross pollination and rejects hierarchies, because only through this ideological rejection of conservative processes can scalability truly be achieved.

Therefore, if inclusive innovation is the kind of innovation that relies on participation and collaboration of all stakeholders, and creating not only synergy but trust, then in what kind of ecosystem would this ideological approach to innovation exist and thrive?

In a following panel discussion composed by Pauline Mujawamariya Koelbl, MD of African Innovation Foundation, and Daan Du Toit, Deputy DG International Cooperation and Resources at the Department of Science and Technology, facilitated by Ilari Patrick Lindy, lead expert of SAIS Programme, inclusive innovation could only exist in an ecosystem designed by Africans for African’s. Du Toit says that in as much as foreign funding and investment has assisted in propelling innovation, South Africa and the continent at large has to start owning its own projects engineered toward innovation for economic inclusivity, because without ownership limitations will always exist. This level of ownership would in turn that regional restrictions be relieved to allow for cross border collaborations, so as to transcend the limited interpretation of innovation from which we presently function and to truly achieve large scalability. Koelbl echoes this point by affirming that “an ideal ecosystem is one which exists beyond borders”, continuing that “lack of cross border collaboration limits potential continental scalability”. Du Toit acknowledges that South Africa’s history is to be blamed for the country’s cultural and economic isolation, but what is most needed now is to understand that scalability and inclusivity relies on convergence of space, ideas, and solutions.

An example of this would be an intentional strategy that allows for and supports the joining of start-ups in the SADC region. Incentivizing this approach would harness large outputs of innovation.

Where innovation was first understood as research and development output, it has since evolved to appreciate and emphasize the role of the entrepreneur as a vehicle for economic expansion. Now the innovator’s role is to identify a problem and to provide a solution and the organizations role is to support development and intellectual property.

Yet, even with this understanding of roles, government and many innovation hubs that invest in funding and development of local innovation, still do not use procurement as an enabler and propeller, where instead institutions continue to outsource or import innovations that already exist locally. In this breath Koelbl says “procurement specifications need to adapt and reflect commitment to innovation”.

This description of an ideal ecosystem for innovation is what grass roots innovators are most in need of. Many of the grassroots innovators present at the conference were there as volunteers because they were without the wherewithal to afford the six-thousand-rand conference ticket. At the Department of Trade and Industry’s Grassroots entrepreneurs discussion, hosted on the second day of the summit, the frustrations of the entrepreneurs in attendance was palpable, citing the anxiety and isolation that one often deals with when operating at a grass roots level.

In her own address Koelbl addresses the lack of support for grass root level entrepreneurs, and partly links it to the culture of geographical space and the exclusion therein toward people on the economic and geographical periphery of society. Only once there is concerted effort to create a pipeline to bring informal economy into the formal economy can inclusive innovation and its extension of social innovation be achieved.