THE outcome of the Vodacom “Please Call Me” court case in favour of the service’s inventor, Nkosana Makate, could deter innovation at the workplace as employees are likely to take their ideas where they can get the best rewards.Last week Makate won his long legal battle with Vodacom, which was refusing to compensate him for the service he came up with in 2001 despite an executive at Vodacom promising to do so. Makate was an intern at Vodacom at that time.The Please Call Me service is widely used across all Vodacom operations and also by its rivals and elsewhere in the world.Vodacom has made billions out of it through voice calls it generated and from advertisements.In his book Second is Nothing, which was published in 2009, former Vodacom Group CEO Alan Knott-Craig claimed to have created the service himself. He was not available for comment last week.In the end, the constitutional court dealt a blow to Vodacom and ordered the company to compensate Makate.The judgment was widely wel...
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