Kathy Gibson is at VMware vForum 2022 – South Africa, which has traditionally had the leading economy in Africa, needs to take advantage of new technologies and opportunities if it wants to retain this position.
That’s the word from Graham Vorster, founder and owner of Black Swan Technologies, who points out that the South African economy outperformed other top African countries in previous years by virtue of being a large and complex economy when measured by IT indicators like network, data centre, and digital readiness.
That said, more recently, some of our underlying infrastructure and human resource indicators have started to deteriorate, he says. Among these is the current loadshedding crisis and skills readiness – specifically the education system’s applicability to digital adoption.
While the South African private sector still performs reasonably well on the global stage, the public sector must improve, Vorster stresses.
There are many opportunities in the country, he adds, but we need to develop an inventor economy.
To do this, we need to foster human curiosity, which is the trait that helps successful people get to where they are.
Technology is important for building an economy, but it is not the most important thing, Vorster says. Far more relevant is the skills availability to create an environment that enables innovation.
South Africa, unfortunately, is not an inventor economy but rather a consumer of other country’s technology. The country has just 60 000 to 70 000 patents active and adds only a couple of thousand every year – a small fraction of the patents lodged or active by technology leaders.
But the ability to use technology is also an economic driver, with major opportunities present in applied artificial intelligence, cloud and edge computing, advanced connectivity and related technologies.
The combination of diverse technology streams is becoming a reality now, Vorster adds. “When we build business cases now, we need to think about this combinatorial effect. And add imagination.”
The metaverse is a great example of this, resulting from a collision of technologies and imagination, Vorster says. “Today, quantum computing seems far out, virtual experiences seem far out. Biodigital convergence seems far out. But there are people thinking about these things.
“South Africans have always been considered a nation of ‘curious minds’, which should lend itself well to an inventor mindset,” Vorster says. “To stay relevant on the global stage and to take advantage of emerging digital use cases, like the metaverse, we need to make sure we continue to improve the foundational platforms required to do so.”