Address by the Minister of Science and Technology, Derek Hanekom at the 2014 Seed South Africa Symposium held at the CSIR Convention Centre, Pretoria
Programme Director; Helen Marquard, Executive Director - SEED Initiative
European Union Ambassador, Roeland van Geer
Representatives from the Higher Education Sector
Representatives from Civil Society
Innovators; entrepreneurs
Members of the media
Ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you for inviting me to participate in this important symposium. I would like to offer a few critical reflections on the themes of promoting grassroots entrepreneurship, sustainability, and innovation. I offer these reflections with the idea that Sustainable Energy, Environment and Development (SEED) and Department of Science and Technology (DST) have somewhat complementary missions, and no doubt also confront similar challenges. It is these challenges I wish to discuss.
Let me begin by stating categorically that I am deeply impressed by the SEED Initiative. I intuitively appreciate SEED’s vision of fostering the three-way relationship between environmental sustainability, poverty reduction, and entrepreneurship, with the recognition that local innovation is often the spark that ignites this dynamic inter-relationship.
Strategic thinking is evident in SEED’s three-tiered approach, which involves: capacity development and networking at grassroots level; promoting productive relationships at national and regional organisations; and sponsoring research and dialogue to promote shared learning and better policies.
There are various alignments with what the South African government in general is seeking to do, and with current practice at DST. Obviously there is the common importance attached to promoting entrepreneurship in the so-called Green Economy. We at DST agree with SEED that the true innovators are out there; our job is to recognise their talents, efforts and creativity, and give them an opportunity to realise their potential, not least by providing funding and by helping them learn from one another. Of course, we also consciously seek to prepare the ground for future, greatly expanded generations of innovators and scientists.
Glancing through the list of SEED Winners from years past, the evident talent out there gives us much reason to be hopeful for the future of South Africa, Africa, and the world.
Having said all this, I remain with two areas of uncertainty.
The first is whether we fully understand the nuances and ambiguities associated with ‘social entrepreneurship’, especially insofar as it relates to conventional entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship is now part of our language and our organisational landscape. For example, we now have the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Cape Town, while the University of Pretoria offers a ‘Social Entrepreneurship Certificate Programme’. Interestingly, University of Cape Town (UCTs) Bertha Centre and University of Pretoria’s certificate programme are creatures of these universities’ respective business schools, suggesting that social entrepreneurship is indeed some kind of variation on conventional entrepreneurship.
Many of our community-based projects in South Africa are teamed up with an academic department somewhere, maybe also a philanthropic organisation or a private entity, and one or two national departments. And this is fantastic, of course; after all, it’s all about partnerships, which are vital, because we bring different strengths and skills and insights.
The concern comes in here – who really is the entrepreneur’? Is it the community-based organisation reaching out to the other partners in recognition of their own limitations, and in their eagerness to get their ideas and initiatives off the ground? Or is the academic department finding ‘the community’ in which to pursue its good work, then linking up with other partners for funding and other forms of support? Or, even if the initiative does originate with actual community members, is it simply because they are aware that this is a means of attracting funding? The latter is more or less what happened in an earlier incarnation of our cooperatives policy – word got around that government awarded grants to co-ops, and suddenly forming a self-help group became a very popular thing to do.
The role of academics in community work is valued, just as we value corporate social investment (CSI), and I would certainly not want to diminish the importance of these efforts. But we may have developed a curious kind of entrepreneurship which is only partially about finding sustainable solutions; it often revolves largely around how to make a compelling case for grant funding on the one hand, or on the other about how a large company can find a community project worth funding. So we need constant reflection on the way we approach the promotion of sustainable grassroots innovation and development, and be prepared lessons from both our mistakes and our successes.
We face a similar challenge at DST, one which we are still working very hard to resolve. We believe that science and technology can drive local enterprise and job creation, thus contributing to poverty reduction. But how does a government department, or even a third party whom we support, articulate with a local community in such a way that the agency of that community is strengthened and developed rather than dented? How can we intervene, and in some cases introduce technological innovations in ways that truly empower people? It is not easy. If SEED has discovered the answer to this challenge, we are eager to learn.
This relates to my second concern. Regarding social entrepreneurship and the Green Economy, I wonder if what we are observing now is a new form of a well-established phenomenon, namely ‘projects’. A ‘project’ is a way in which government and sometimes funders organise work, for instance when seeking to improve service delivery. However, as much as a ‘project’ may be a good means of organising work of some kinds, it is often an awkward vehicle for promoting economic and self-empowerment. ‘Community projects’ often lack the dynamism and resilience one associates with entrepreneurs.
Projects may be an essential means of making the environment more conducive for entrepreneurs, for example through improving infrastructure. But often we seek to group people together into projects which have some of the surface features of an enterprise, but without having the heart and soul of an enterprise. At its worst, this could’ descend to a process of cherry-picking the best looking opportunities that are identified in communities, without a closer look at whether the critical ingredients of success are there. In our wild dreams, we hope that these projects will provide the catalysts for an entrepreneurial tsunami that transforms the community and its members. What we are not sure of is the nature and context of these catalysts.
There is no doubt that the innovative geniuses are out there, in universities and science councils, in CSI programmes, in established Non-Governmental Organisation (NGOs), and most certainly in our communities. We embrace grassroots innovation as a nimble, cost-effective component of a broader national innovation system. But how to promote it, foster cross-pollination, and achieve some kind of scale? How and where will social or conventional entrepreneurship, applied to the Green Economy, yield something that is so good and compelling that it spreads virally, without dependence on a commensurate increase in external funding support?
After all, this is what innovation is largely about – some new product or way of doing things is created in a particular environment and with some adaptation and care, its applicability to other places and situations becomes increasingly obvious; it can’t be stopped. Then, instead of figuring out how we can support our growing list of projects, we strive to keep up with, and further enhance dynamic, organic change. This is the kind of problem I hope we will someday be complaining about.
I have no doubt that SEED is moving us in the right direction, and perhaps it is even much further along the road than I’m aware of. There is much that we as government can learn from your experiences and successes.
In conclusion, I would like to applaud SEED for its excellent work, while also commending the many role-players who support SEED directly or indirectly, or who are involved in similar initiatives. I would also like to express thanks to SEED for organising this symposium; symposia such as these are vital for us to share our insights; challenges and concerns.
I wish you the best in your further deliberations.
Thank you.
