Managing director of Microsoft South Africa, Mteto Nyati;
General manager of Microsoft West, East, and Central Africa, Hennie Loubser;
Distinguished guests;
Members of the media;
Technological innovation and excellence are the driving force behind the success of business in the 21st century. Reliable, fast and consistent systems are the backbone of all effective companies in global businesses, providing the efficiency demanded by consumers today.
As many have observed before me, evolution is an interesting thing. The evolution of a single species doesn’t change just that species. It changes everything.
I’m not referring here to the Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest, although that does apply to the objectives behind the establishment of this Microsoft Technology Centre or the “MTC”.
Organisations will use Microsoft technologies to evolve into more efficient, better performing entities. That set me thinking about evolution as a process; about the ways in which creatures, political ideologies, business systems, and nations adjust to internal and external stimuli.
Our Cradle of Mankind, for instance, provides proof that evolution has many dead ends. Mankind’s apparent precursors, Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus, both petered out into extinction. Scientists tell us that they did so because they didn’t adapt adequately to their environment, particularly when it changed.
There is no doubt that South Africa is fully aware that it is entering upon a relentless process of innovation in order to become a highly regarded contributor to the global community. At the same time, I believe that international players are beginning to appreciate the role Africa will play in their own sustainability and have a sense that they may have to innovate in order to optimise Africa’s contribution to their business.
The Economist tells us that Africa is the second-fastest growing region in the world, with seven of the ten fastest-growing economies in the world. This growth can only be sustained through innovation and ensuring that innovation addresses the challenges that still afflict our continent.
The key to a mutually beneficial evolutionary process – in terms of none of us finding ourselves in a dead end – lies in something called collaborative intelligence. It ties in with the theme of today’s event and that of the MTC, which is Collaboration.
But, I’d like to take the concept to its logical conclusion.
Collaborative intelligence has become a branch of information technology that focuses on pattern recognition rather than simply analysis of facts as a way of solving problems. Specifically, it acknowledges the role that human beings’ perception of facts, and their capacity for pattern recognition, plays in problem solving.
This facility is the first of Microsoft’s 31 MTCs to be established in Africa. I am reliably told that Microsoft has also launched a US$75 million Strategy 4Africa programme aimed at increasing Internet accessibility via affordable smart devices, educating the next generation of African web developers, and promoting new Afrocentric technologies.
Also, by 2016, Microsoft plans to have tens of millions of smart devices in the hands of African youth, bring one million African small and medium-size enterprises online, up skill one hundred thousand members of Africa’s existing workforce, and help an additional hundred thousand recent graduates develop marketable skills. Microsoft will place 75% of these graduates in jobs. This indeed is good news, considering that about 54 percent of Africa's youth are unemployed today, and nearly three quarters live on less than US$2 a day.
Refusing to participate in the technological revolution is not an option.
Similarly, the National Development Plan correctly identifies very important roles for science and technology. The elimination of poverty and inequality requires inclusive economic growth, which obliges South Africa to make better use of its resources, especially its people, and to become more globally competitive.
Over the weekend, I was pleased that Microsoft launched its third trial in Africa of Television White Spaces Broadband, to coincide with National Science Week. The pilot is a joint initiative between Microsoft; the CSIR’s Meraka Institute; the University of Limpopo and local network builder Multisource. With the University of Limpopo as a hub for a white space network deployment, the pilot will explore the use of TV white spaces and solar-powered base stations to provide low-cost wireless broadband access to five secondary schools in remote parts of the Limpopo province.
If successful, this innovation will be good news for us. As you are aware, the majority of our people, especially those living in rural communities, are still without access to basic ICT infrastructure and services. We are working to change this, and we are confident, following this intervention and other technological and innovation breakthroughs of recent years, that the pace of progress is picking up.
The DST attaches great value to mutually beneficial partnerships. We recognise the importance of meaningful public-private partnerships in our National System of Innovation. We believe that in order to sustain our successes, and to meet the on-going challenges and advance our national system of innovation, we must constantly strive to create a conducive atmosphere for effective partnerships.
These partnerships enhance our capacity to develop innovative solutions to the most pressing social challenges facing our country and continent, such as unemployment, poverty, service delivery, health and, in particular, the scourge of diseases such as HIV and AIDS, TB, diabetes and malaria.
I see a future, however, in which Africa’s evolution, in turn, imprints values, processes, and innovation on the organisations and communities with which it interacts. For instance, Microsoft’s solutions must, inevitably, adapt to – and adopt - African circumstances, African needs, and African innovation.
Africa’s drive and hunger for innovation will change the world beyond Africa because, out of it will come a new way of thinking about the world, about life, about health, technology, education, agriculture. Africa’s socio-economic evolution will change conventional assumptions about every compartment of human activity.
For companies like Microsoft, Africa is a vast new market. Becoming a dominant player in this market will, by shifting the emphasis of the company’s balance sheet, alter the focus, nature, and structure of the parent company.
When that point is reached – for Microsoft and any other organisations that seek to participate in Africa’s development - collaborative intelligence won’t simply be a sharing by non-African organisations of non-African technologies and ideas with Africa, it will be a mutually beneficial fusion of all the different life and business patterns each society recognises and responds to.
In other words, ladies and gentlemen, I see today as one of the steps towards a world in which Africa’s capacity for innovation will shape the future of everyone on this planet. When we begin to collaborate on the rebirth of a nation or a continent, we collectively alter human destiny.
Even Darwin, whose theory of evolution was based on competing and survival of the fittest, argued that co-operation and collaboration must have evolved because it conferred an advantage.
It’s a rather nice irony, I think, that Africa’s first Microsoft Technology Centre, here in Bryanston, will be using collaboration to give South African and African organisations a competitive advantage. It will be using innovation from Microsoft to liberate innovation among Africans.
And, I believe, rather than creating Afro-centric solutions, it will help to create an Afro-global collaborative intelligence that has a human focus and a socially responsible heart.
Thank you.
