Covid has changed rules globally, learn from “lean startup Africa”
IN a “lean startup” continent like Africa, “novel” practices work best when it comes to innovation, according to Professor Hemmanth (Herman) Singh, speaking at the inaugural WiT Africa – that means not “best” or “good” or “emergent” but something that’s completely new and never been tried before.
Explaining, the author of “Di-Volution: An Essential Guide to Winning in a Digitally Transformed Post-pandemic Environment” said there were essentially four steps in the innovation journey.
The first is when you know what is required for success and the technology is known and certain – that’s best practice. “In other words, go and look at what everyone’s doing, and teach people that, and that’s what textbooks are written on,” said the CEO of Future Advisory, a Johannesburg-based digital transformation and start up acceleration firm.
The second is where there’s less certainty about what’s needed by customers – because best practice doesn’t exist yet. He likened this to what we have learnt during Covid – “washing your hands, wearing a mask, that’s good practice, we’re figuring it out as we go, then the certainty gets even lower and with innovation, certainty decreases”.
“So now you’re not sure what customers want and you’re not sure what technology you’re going to use? Well, now you got to use what I call, emergent practice, you got to get to the very edge of your industry and you got to observe research, and you got to live the lives of consumers and see what’s emerging there and try to copy that.
“Finally, you get to what’s happening in Africa, where the needs are completely unknown, the technology infrastructures completely unknown. I refer to this as novel practice. In other words, you are going to be the first person to build this, you better know how to build it, and you get to take the risks.
“Because guess what? No, there’s no textbook because you are writing the textbook … textbooks haven’t been written yet because best practices, good practices, digital transformation don’t exist.”
And Covid being the great leveller that it is has changed the rules not only in Africa but also globally.
Singh likened it to when apartheid ended in South Africa – “we had a certain set of big monsters – white Africans, companies, ruling the country, then the rules changed. Sanctions got lifted, we had a black president – where and when the rules change, everybody goes back to zero.
“In apartheid, those companies who profit in the past don’t profit in the future. Well, Covid has done the same thing to the entire world – when the rules change, everybody goes back to zero and boy, did the rules change under Covid”.
Singh is a big advocate of design thinking because he believes it can address what he calls “the hippo problem”.
“The big challenge is people think they know what people want and I guarantee they don’t,” he said.
Citing the time when he was working on building the third Internet bank in the world, he recalled the moment when he realised that the people questioning him was not his target market. “I realised I was talking to people who are very old, very successful, very rich and very wrong. And the challenge that you have is, this is what you have to deal with in the world today.”
He said, “The hippo problem is the highest income person’s opinion … design thinking helps you overcome the hippo problem because it uses what’s called data driven decision making, which says, you know, your opinion is interesting, but irrelevant. I actually want to hear from the people and that’s what design thinking does.”
What he loves about Africa is that it’s organic, grassroots, pervasive and dynamic. “The beauty about Africa is we’ve had 1,000, 10,000, 50,000 years of innovating with constraints. This is very different to the rest of the world. “Lean Startup” should actually have evolved in Africa, because it’s the way we’ve always innovated. We’ve never had resources, we’ve never had skills, we’ve never had infrastructure. And we’ve always had to innovate with nothing.”
He noted that “people were running around in Africa using and recycling scrap and garbage and making amazing things. And that’s really what Lean Startups are about. We’ve always been good at that. And whenever things didn’t work, we pivoted quickly. Africa, for me, lives lean startup and it is a very dynamic space right now.
Watch the full interview here.
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