Innovation and entrepreneurialism

Through sheer need from isolation in the eighties, local companies became good at building their own solutions to IT needs.

Our innovator of the week, Pierre van der Hoven, speaks of entrepreneurialism borne of another kind of need, in Soweto.

And yet there is a certain kind of South African that doesn`t feel the pride one feels on seeing the country rise from its ashes. Hundreds of thousands of young South Africans are still leaving the country, mostly for a city covered in soot and lashed by foul weather, a city whose natives are so overrun by foreigners that they`ve recoiled into sullen insularity and let`s face it - fairly common flare-ups of yobbish racism. The pay is pretty bad, the cost of living is laughable, even without a car or a bond, the job selections are systematically and hierarchically exclusionary, and yet everything is "better over there", for a certain kind of South African.

It goes without saying that we have our problems too, but being South African at this juncture in history is, to me, an extraordinarily proud thing. The beginning was when we managed a turnaround from race-defined rule to a fairly well-run democracy that is growing robustly - doing so in ten years, without war.

The historical significance of such a thing is enormous. We`ve gone through the first steps of `responsible capitalism`, as it is known, far sooner than any other country with similar demographics. We`ve undertaken restitution on a far grander scale than traditional ideas of ownership in other countries have had to consider. In that sense, no Western country knows what we know about humanity and commerce.

So in a very real way, the first signs of a new world order have shown themselves, and they are most keenly visible right here. Our cover story, which takes this vision and applies it by proposing a decisive fusion of black economic empowerment and the Proudly South African initiative, shows what SA could yet become. It`s just innovative thinking, really.