Maize offcuts can be used to clean water — but a good idea is not enough

In one of SA’s most industrialised regions in Gauteng, untreated sewage enters the Vaal River system daily, affecting about 19-million people who depend on the water for drinking and commercial purposes. The SA Human Rights Commission has set up an inquiry and criticised broken wastewater systems as well as administrative inadequacies. Now an innovative natural water purification solution that makes use of maize offcuts has emerged that could address the problem.  

Developed by environmental scientist and master’s student Pinky Mokwena, the technology was identified via an interuniversity innovation competition organised by the Tshwane metro as part of a specific strategy to find new ways to fix service-entrenched delivery challenges. It’s this kind of approach and commitment to innovation that earned the metropole an award for innovation in the public sector category in the 2021/2022 SA Innovation League Awards.

An initiative of Innocentrix, supported by strategic partners — the Da Vinci Institute’s Technology Top 100 Business Innovation Awards and Milpark Business School — the awards are the first to promote business innovation capability building in SA. They are designed to encourage more innovation and identify the conditions necessary to facilitate it, and are aligned with the ISO/SANS 56002 innovation management standards.  

That SA needs more innovation is painfully evident. Innovation is widely seen to be a key requirement for sustained and long-term growth and development for any economy, yet despite having all the ingredients for breakaway growth — a young, urbanising population and abundant natural resources — the country continues to underperform on innovation.  

According to the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2021, SA is ranked 61st out of 132 countries worldwide in terms of innovation and comes in after Mauritius to rank second on the continent. The GII, which is published by the UN World Intellectual Property Organisation, notes that while African countries are still not able to establish sustained and long-term growth in most innovation indicators, there does seem to be hope in terms of certain innovation strengths, citing trademark filings in particular as evidence for this.

Certainly, as the many candidates for the SA Innovation League Awards showed, there is no shortage of innovative organisations in SA that are doing extremely well, even by international standards, but these are often stymied by the context in which they are operating. 

This is because having a good idea is not enough to ensure innovation will succeed. Successful innovation takes place within ecosystems that make it possible for an idea to be fully developed to commercial viability. The GII report therefore calls on policymakers to encourage national intellectual property systems and address bureaucratic issues that keep entrepreneurs from succeeding.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report 2020, such ecosystems could include a business environment that rewards risk-taking, regulations that provide an effective working economic and legal framework, and investment in knowledge-generation (universities, research centres and laboratories). 

More can be done to deliberately and systematically improve such innovation infrastructure in SA’s cities and at national level, as Tshwane has done. For example, it has established a dedicated research and innovation unit, which acts as a catalyst for collaborative research and innovation aimed at enhancing service delivery and socioeconomic development. It is this that has helped it find and develop Mokwena’s wastewater solution, among other ideas.   

Businesses too can take steps to strengthen their innovation management systems. Judges for the SA Innovation League Awards rated all applicants according to a series of criteria. These included how well they scan the external context to understand the potential impact of innovation in the real world; how much leadership support exists for innovation management; what planning is done for innovation and to what extent there is organisational support for innovation; how the organisation operationalises innovation; the performance evaluations that exist for innovation; and the extent to which a business is taking steps to improve the areas where innovation is lacking.  

Finally, the allocation of resources to train employees in innovative capacity and promote innovation as well as to develop new ideas is also flagged as a key indicator of innovation success.  

We all know that SA is in crisis mode at present, with reports of an impending fifth wave of Covid-19 and the continued threat of load-shedding overshadowing economic growth. In such times the thought of directing much-needed financial resources and effort into something as nebulous as innovation could seem foolish, but research suggests the opposite is true. 

Research by McKinsey & Co shows that companies that invest in innovation through a crisis outperform peers during a recovery, while the World Intellectual Property Organisation calls for world governments to boost R&D spending at times of economic slowdown as a way of filling any spending gaps left by the private sector. 

For those who are still wondering if investing in innovation is truly necessary at this time, it may be helpful to consider the words of one of the world’s great innovators, Apple founder Steve Jobs, who famously said: “Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity — not a threat.”   

• Fourie is the head of executive education at Milpark Business School. Mayer is CEO of Innocentrix.