Why brilliant ideas aren’t enough

Walking through the inaugural South Africa Innovation Week (SAIW) at Nasrec last week, I saw the country’s creative potential on full display. 

Exhibitors pitched mushroom-based pet products, goat’s milk cosmetics and apps for film production, event management and bus and taxi logistics. Universities showcased their technology transfer offices. Government agencies — from the South African National Space Agency to the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation to the Medical Research Council — demonstrated cutting-edge research. Stands for sector education and training authorities (Setas) and incubators buzzed with activity.

Yet for all this energy, South Africa still ranks just 61st out of 139 economies in the Global Innovation Index and its score has decreased steadily over the past decade. The problem is not a shortage of ideas. It is everything that happens — or does not happen — after the lightbulb moment.

Ask different experts about South Africa’s innovation bottleneck and you will get contradictory answers that reveal how fragmented the ecosystem has become.

Audrey Verhaeghe, founder of the South African Innovation Summit, the precursor event to SAIW, sees a clear gap: “We do not have enough resources dedicated to pre-seed and seed stages. There is sufficient funding for commercialisation of well-developed products but not nearly enough to get ideas off the ground.”

Audrey introduced me to Ismael Abdoola, acting chief executive of the Technology Innovation Agency (TIA), who confirmed the scarcity: only three major organisations consistently fund pre-commercial innovation — the Technology and Human Resources for Industry Programme (Thrip), the Support Programme for Industrial Innovation (SPII) and TIA. 

For an entire country’s innovation ecosystem, that is dangerously thin.

But here is where it gets complicated. Dr Adrienne Leussa, a commercialisation expert, offers a counterpoint: “The Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (the dtic) cannot even find enough early-stage projects to invest in. They must sometimes give back their money.”

How can there simultaneously be too little funding and too few investable projects? 

The answer reveals the ecosystem’s core dysfunction: a broken pipeline between raw ideas and investment-ready ventures. Innovators cannot access the support needed to become fundable, while funders wait for polished proposals that never materialise.

Taniko Sher, executive director of the African Institute for Entrepreneurship, diagnoses a deeper cultural issue: “Private money — and even government money — in South Africa is risk-averse. It would rather invest in sure things.” The result? “The government wants to invest in as many innovators as it can, seeking to be fair to all, which spreads resources too thin.”

The brain drain: Exporting innovation, importing solutions

The consequences of this dysfunction are expensive.

Cleola Kunene, executive head of small and medium enterprises at the JSE, puts it bluntly: “When we do not invest in our own innovations, we end up importing them at a much higher cost.”

The pattern repeats: Elon Musk leaves for Silicon Valley. A Cape Town team develops a cloud computing component that becomes part of Amazon Web Services — commercialised abroad. Brilliant South African minds create value that other countries capture.

Verhaeghe identifies another barrier: “So many of the impact NGOs that support other parts of Africa are not here anymore because they say it is too developed.” South Africa occupies an awkward middle ground — too developed for development aid, not developed enough to compete globally. And broad-based black  economic empowerment (broad-based BEE) makes it even harder for international investors to participate, adding regulatory complexity that drives capital elsewhere. There is also leakage from corruption and patronage, reducing the available pool of finance and further driving away the international market.

The execution gap: Ideas without implementation

Even when funding appears, many innovations stumble on execution.

Dr Leussa identifies the skills crisis: “Entrepreneurship is poorly taught in this country. We are good at coming up with ideas in theory but not at implementing them. We patent concepts but so much of the time the creators are academics with neither interest in nor ability to commercialise.”

Universities are trying to adapt. The University of Cape Town (UCT), for instance, created a small grant fund to support commercialisation in “tiny steps” — acknowledging that researchers need help translating laboratory breakthroughs into market-ready products.

But the gap between academic innovation and commercial execution remains vast. Brilliant scientists often lack business acumen, while entrepreneurs struggle to access cutting-edge research. The two worlds operate in parallel, rarely intersecting productively enough.

The coordination crisis: Everyone working, nothing working together

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of South Africa’s innovation challenge is that all the pieces exist — they just do not connect.

Lilah Clark from the JSE captures the problem: “We need better alignment among government, corporates, academia and capital providers.”

Sher illustrates this with a concrete example: a drone project that took five years from white paper to still being in the testing phase. “No one type of organisation can pull this off alone,” she notes — yet the coordination mechanisms to bring different players together remain weak.

The corporate sector’s absence from Innovation Week itself tells a story. While universities, government agencies and incubators filled the exhibition floor, corporates appeared only as panel speakers. The disconnect between established business and emerging innovation could not be clearer.

KK Diaz from A Game Business argues the support infrastructure has not evolved: “We need to move beyond supporting SMEs the same way we did before Covid-19. The world has accelerated but our support systems have not kept pace.”

The visibility problem: Success hidden in plain sight

Not everyone accepts the narrative of failure. Nthame Mametja from 22 On Sloane offers a provocative counterargument: “The ecosystem is growing into well-structured processes.” The real problem? “Our main problem is the lack of reporting, which makes things seem less successful than they are. Because so much of the innovation is in the grassroots, at township and rural levels, not in the mainstream, we do not even know it is happening.”

This raises an important question: Is South Africa’s innovation ecosystem genuinely underperforming or is it simply underreported? The country still ranks second in Africa (behind only Mauritius), ahead of innovation leaders such as Rwanda, Nigeria and Kenya, so the argument that South Africa is not performing too badly is plausible.

Perhaps the problem is not absolute failure but relative underperformance — a country with enormous potential achieving modest results when it should be achieving exceptional ones.

Tswelelo Piet Mashita of Abiri Innovations, a cow-tracking platform funded by New Space Systems, says: “Compared with a few years ago, there has been meaningful progress. But there is still a lot of work to be done. We need to continue strengthening the entire ecosystem — from grassroots innovation and skills development to incubators, accelerators and funding networks — so that it becomes more inclusive and sustainable.”

As to why a space company is funding a cow-tracking company, New Space Systems’ James Barrington-Brown says: “Tech is not the solution. The market is the solution. Tswelelo is as close as you can get to the market — he is from the village. The challenge with international money is that they do not understand the market. And that is a big problem.”

What needs to change

The diagnosis is clear: South Africa’s innovation challenge is not about creativity or ambition. It is about coordination, execution and risk tolerance.

The ecosystem needs:

• Better pipeline development — bridging the gap between raw ideas and investment-ready ventures through mentorship, business training and structured support programmes;
• Smarter risk capital — funding mechanisms that accept early-stage uncertainty while providing guidance to improve success rates, rather than demanding proof before providing support;
• Stronger university-industry links — systematic pathways for commercialising academic research, with incentives for researchers to engage with business realities;
• Coordinated ecosystem development — platforms that bring together government, corporates, investors and entrepreneurs around specific challenges rather than operating in silos; 
• Cultural shift on failure — reframing setbacks as learning opportunities rather than careerending disasters, creating space for the experimentation innovation requires;
• Better storytelling — documenting and celebrating successes, particularly at grassroots levels, to build momentum and attract resources; and
• Closer collaboration between the private sector and government — SAIW can serve as a national barometer that measures progress from year to year.

SAIW showcased a country brimming with creative energy and entrepreneurial ambition. But innovation without commercialisation is just expensive research. Ideas without execution are just dreams. And an ecosystem where all the pieces exist but do not connect is a system designed for frustration.

South Africa has the talent. It has ideas. It has institutions. What it needs is the connective tissue to turn potential into performance — and the patience to accept that breakthrough innovation requires risk, failure and time.

The will to succeed is strong and that counts for something. The question is whether it counts for enough.

Michael Brian Lee is the Mail & Guardian’s US correspondent, currently based in New York.