Africa’s large, young population is creating a culture conducive for innovation, according to Andile Ngcaba, founder of Convergence Partners.
Speaking today at the Fifth Global Forum on Innovation and Technology Entrepreneurship in East London, South Africa, Ngcaba discussed innovation in technology and embracing failure.
With regards to technological innovation, which has changed the way in which people live, Ngcaba said: “If you would have been speaking in 1990 [at] a conference like this, there was a cliche that people used – there are more telephones in Manhattan than there were in the African continent, but over the last 25 years Africa has managed to have today, over 700 million phones.”
Of Africa’s predominantly young population, Ngcaba said: “It creates a conducive environment for innovation and development, and for us to be able to take what we call teens [and] teach them how to code, how to develop software and how to build systems that will take us into the future.”
Ngcaba argued innovation takes place in the mind before a computer has even been touched or software developed.
He said entrepreneurs must learn to “embrace failure” if they want to innovate further.
“It’s a culture issue. If we [are]… able to remove this concept of fear to try something we [are]… able to innovate.”
He described the fear to try something as a fundamental issue “that sits in our minds”, and sometimes it has nothing to do with software and technology.
Ngcaba made references to some of the world’s greatest innovations from the construction of the first helicopter to the launching of Earth’s first communications satellite.
