Today, Accenture South Africa held its 4th annual Innovation Conference giving delegates and attendees the opportunity to engage with the world’s leading innovators on market-ready concepts and disruptive business insights.

Accenture is focused on engaging with clients to help them embrace innovation through leveraging advanced digital technologies – such as Artificial Intelligence and platform economy, which could impact their profitability and the way humans are responding to the fourth industrial revolution.

At Accenture Innovation Conference 2017, delegates and attendees had access to extremely useful insights on the levels of innovation in the country– including areas of improvement.

Every company talks about innovation, but aren’t investing in it as much as they should.

In the context of the fourth industrial revolution, we are living in the era of abundance, and we have all the resources we require to be able to resolve humanities biggest challenges.

We don’t have to think about our problems only within the confines of the resources we have, since, we have all the technology we need today.

William Mzimba, CEO of Accenture South Africa and Chairman of Accenture Africa, is of the belief that South Africa even has sufficient monetary resources, through means such as crowdsourcing, to able to collectively get together and begin to solve South Africa’s greatest challenges.

According to Mzimba, the only thing lacking is that we as a nation haven’t yet embraced innovation, which is visible through an indication of the index research that Accenture has conducted this year.

“As a nation, we haven’t yet fully understood the fourth industrial revolution has ushered technologies that can enable us to change the course of direction of humanity on this continent,” he said.

“If we don’t embrace these technologies and move at speed, we are once again going to be the forgotten continent.”

We need to innovate at the pace of the fastest technology of the industry now, added Paul Nunes, Accenture Managing Director.

“You can’t innovate at the pace of mining, you have to innovate at the pace of technology,” Nunes said.

According to Mzimba, some of the challenges we can easily resolve in South Africa through embracing innovation include, education, poverty, and lack of growth, especially since we have all the resources available to us.

“Our nation needs to collectively unleash the power by leveraging the problems we have by igniting ingenuity and solve the challenges we have,” he explained.

On top of that, the companies that are finding ways to embed innovation – those allowing ideas and the decision-making process to disrupt the industries they’re in, are the ones that are truly successful.

Accenture, in partnership with the DaVinci Institute, has presented the findings of the Innovation Index, followed by an awards ceremony announcing the 2017 Innovation Index Winners.

The companies that have been rewarded for the most dynamic, disruptive and forward-thinking businesses constituted an interesting mix of young geniuses and old masters, on one hand, individuals with limited work and life experience to some with vast experience, as well as people with no qualifications to people with PhDs.

The Accenture Innovation Index measures recognises and rewards innovation and systems of innovation in organisations of all sizes in the South African public and private sectors every year.

The Index is designed to provide a national benchmark for innovation, providing businesses and policymakers with an authoritative and objective snapshot of the state of innovation within their organisations and in South Africa.

The 2017 Accenture Innovation Index winners are:

  • Emerging Enterprises, Concept category: ColonyLive
  • Small Enterprises, Concept category: HearX’s HearScreen TX concept
  • Medium Enterprises Concept category: SSG Consulting’s KEY360 App
  • Large Enterprises Winner, Concept category: FNB for FNBConnect and Integrateme for the concept
  • Large Enterprise (joint winners), Concept category: InterGreatMe and FNB
  • Overall Innovation Master (turnover less than R35m): Bramhope Group
  • Overall Innovation Master (turnover in excess of R35m): First National Bank (FNB)