Accenture is on the hunt to find Africa’s top tech start-up superstars – the digital pioneers solving critical challenges with technology across the continent. It’s a search for Africa’s big thinkers and big doers – visionaries who fearlessly push the boundaries of progress to shift African innovation to the next level.
Around the world, diverse players are coming together – forming new ecosystems to solve social and business problems. Africa is no exception. Some of the most pivotal parts within these ecosystems are the disruptive tech solution providers – those creating new ways of solving problems, supplying innovative products and offering faster development times and cost-effective delivery.
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The Africa top 30 tech start-ups initiative, powered by Accenture Africa alongside publication partner Forbes, runs as part of Accenture’s market-leading focus on open innovation. “Open innovation allows a path for collaboration between established businesses and innovative start-ups with great products, but no direct route to market,” says Sandiso Sibisi, Open Innovation Africa Lead at Accenture South Africa. “African start-ups often struggle to find an opportunity to plug their great technologies into established client value chains. Yet, with the right support, this all becomes possible, opening the doors to amazing opportunities for value creation, benefiting Africa and its people.”
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About the initiative
The initiative is open to start-ups from across Africa who are solving the continent’s challenges in business, government, civil society and more. All qualifying entrants are welcome (see rules below). Accenture is also particularly interested in entrants working in the spheres of artificial intelligence, blockchain and security, big data and analytics capabilities, Industry X.0, DevTech and Automation as well as extended reality.
Through careful research and field surveying, Africa’s Top 30 tech start-ups will list and fairly reward Africa’s best. The judging panel will include directors of VCs, tech incubators and accelerators from across the continent, academics as well as corporate sector specialists familiar with open innovation and the integration of start-up technologies into established value chains.
In addition to media exposure, listed companies will also participate in the Accenture Africa led Corporate Market Access Week taking place in Johannesburg in February 2019, where they will have an opportunity to showcase their offerings, sell their ideas to corporates, learn how to pitch for new business, and co-create solutions based on issues faced by Accenture clients. They will also get a chance to display their offerings within the Accenture South Africa’s Liquid Studio for a year and be part of the global Accenture Open Innovation network.
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The judging process
Entrants will undergo two rounds of judging. Round 1 will involve quantitative assessments and questionnaires, after which a longlist of top candidates will be decided upon.
Round 2 will identify the final top 30, with judging including a set of qualitative survey questions and analysis of key business metrics, among others.
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Rules, important information and how to enter
Applications for Africa’s Top 30 start-ups opened 07 September and will close 07 October 2018.
List of top start-ups will be finalised November 30th and announced alongside the survey results in the Feb/Mar 2019 edition of Forbes Magazine.
Highlights and results of the research process will be published alongside the Africa’s top 30 tech start-ups.
To qualify, start-ups must:
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<li>Be an African start-up, founded by an African</li>
<li>Be a registered business</li>
<li>Have been in operation for less than 9 years</li>
<li>Demonstrate innovation</li>
<li>Target and fill a significant market gap</li>
<li>Demonstrate exponential growth</li>
<li>Provide a product or service unconstrained by geography</li>
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Additional evaluation criteria will include, but not be limited to, businesses’ financial metrics and performance, innovation measures, team experience, knowledge and media attention. Number of employees, impact creation, representation of diversity, patents, business models and more will also be factored into the judges’ final decision.
To enter, visit <a href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__platform.younoodle.com_competition_africas-5Ftop-5F30-5Ftech-5Fstartups&amp;d=DwMFaQ&amp;c=eIGjsITfXP_y-DLLX0uEHXJvU8nOHrUK8IrwNKOtkVU&amp;r=O_d6gfGZe3omUngrk9mlhituvBHT9ju2h9DEa9g5Cz0&amp;m=nM3PXdtowo-SBRBnVFCCn4XtlFK2k3XKKVannZYiWZg&amp;s=-c_g_4vPlaGntyIhl__p_gXbqJW076fRaPXJOQWBqeQ&amp;e=">https://platform.younoodle.com/competition/africas_top_30_tech_startups</a> and follow the instructions.
Fire Starters don’t wait in line. They see further and reach further, always going beyond to solve the challenges they know they can find unique solutions to. Accenture seeks to recognise these unique start-ups and accelerate the transformation of how Africans everywhere work and live.
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Accenture

Africa’s Top 30 Tech Start-Ups Opens for Entries

The past year has seen only marginal growth in innovation by South African companies. According to Accenture’s <a href="https://cdn.cnbcafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/02101508/AccentureInnovationIndex_Analysis.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Innovation Index 2017</a> released at the Accenture Innovation Conference recently, the country has seen a moderate increase in innovation, scoring additional two points from 2016 to reach 52 points in 2017. Over a three-year period, the score has only increased by six points. This growth is, however, not advancing at the pace required to translate into stable economic growth.
The index suggests that South African companies are not spending their allocated budgets on innovation due to economic uncertainties. On average, companies are putting aside 45 percent of their annual revenue for innovation developments, yet actual spending is cautious and conservative at 36 percent.
“In a rapidly digitising business environment where new players are disrupting traditional revenue streams across all industry sectors, it is now more important than ever for companies to be stepping up their innovation game,” said William Mzimba, Chief Executive of Accenture South Africa and Chairman of Accenture Africa. “Digital innovation is reshaping industries by disrupting traditional business and operating models. But it is also having a profound impact on society, presenting both challenges and opportunities for businesses and policy-makers on the African continent. Innovation champions know this and their approach is seeing them achieve almost double the innovation ROI of the rest of the market,” said Mzimba.
According to Yusof Seedat, Director at Accenture Research, key is to establish the most effective way to drive the innovation agenda in these challenging times. “The good news, however, is that pockets of excellence do exist. There is a clear distinction between Innovation Leaders – companies that are successfully managing to execute across the various stages of the innovation value chain scoring 65 points and above on the Index (27 percent of the total sample), and the rest of the market – those that are struggling to move beyond their innovation strategy and not achieving their true potential in terms of innovation,” said Seedat.
<div id="attachment_34446" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34446" class=" wp-image-34446" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Accenture-Innovation-Index-supplement-e1510925211182-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="333" />The Accenture Innovation Index supplement (Photo supplied)</div>
The innovation value chain
Accenture measured innovation maturity across five stages: Innovation Strategy, Ideation, Absorption, Execution as well as Benefits and Impact. Throughout the stages, Accenture found that as companies mature their innovation capability, their focus shifts from just developing ideas towards a more comprehensive innovation value chain. Early innovation initiatives focused almost exclusively on brainstorming and ideation. This has recently been augmented with a concerted effort to ensure that relevant ideas are well executed.
“Interestingly, ‘absorption’ emerged as a key stage between ‘ideas’ and ‘execution’. Idea absorption
indicates a company’s ability to successfully filter, prioritise and channel the best ideas to the execution stage. This stage is a crucial linking stage between two very different innovation skills: the creative ideation space and the clinical execution space.” said Seedat.
The index shows that companies are aware of the need to innovate: they score high at the strategy stage (83 points) which entails creating the plans and vision set to innovate. However, they score lower on all other aspects, from ideation (44 points) to absorption, at 53 points, execution at 59 points and, finally, achieving the desired benefits at 37 points.
“Companies are struggling to seamlessly translate their innovation strategy to well-executed innovations that realise maximum benefits. Our findings point to several areas creating this anomaly – from weak innovative cultures and poor organisational processes that do not fully support the innovation vision of organisations, to inadequate information dissemination and collaboration, and narrowly focused innovation policies,” noted Seedat.
Where it all begins: Innovation Strategy
Institutionalising structured innovation capability is necessary to fuel growth, the report notes. This is a responsibility that extends far beyond the office of the CEO, however – organisations’ entire top teams have to be on board. Key is that these individuals do not all have to be creative masterminds; more important is their ability to draw out the skills of others to build an innovation culture.
At the Strategy stage, innovation is indeed on the radars of SA’s most forward-thinking businesses – 90 percent of Innovation Leaders have instilled an innovation culture, according to the report. In these companies, innovation is seen as an important part of employees’ daily jobs. This stands in contrast to 65 percent of the rest of the market.
Moreover, Leaders recognise that cultivating innovation means hiring intelligently. When it comes to skills, only 56 percent of companies in the rest of the market recruit those with specific skill sets to support innovation-related activities, as opposed to 100 percent of Innovation Leaders.
Powering strategic decision making with data is also a key innovation enabler for leaders with 80 percent saying they see the full potential of business intelligence and analytics to drive innovation and inform strategy compared to 35 percent of the rest of the market.
Homing in on innovation: The Ideation stage
Innovation Leaders scored 67 for Ideation – the stage during which strategy is turned into actual concepts – leading the rest of the market (at 36 points) by a large margin.
A factor setting Innovation Leaders apart is collaboration within and outside the organisation, the report shows. Eighty percent of Innovation Leaders have digital platforms in place for employees to interact and share ideas, versus 37 percent of the rest. Further, a mere 44 percent of rest-of-market organisations encourage or make use of cross-teaming and collaboration between different stakeholders, as opposed to 85 percent of Innovation Leaders.
Absorption: Separating the best from the rest
The third stage of the value chain, Absorption, measures companies’ ability to sort through, prioritise and align around the good ideas generated during ideation. Low absorption limits companies’ ability to execute and stymies innovation efforts over the long term. Innovation Leaders score 77 for this metric, with the rest of the market coming in at 44. The country’s most innovative companies are fast movers: 80 percent of Innovation Leaders are more adept at taking a year or less from initial prototype development to full commercialisation, the report found.
Putting innovation into practice: Execution and Impact
At the Execution stage, 85 percent of Innovation Leaders are focusing on disruptive innovations, leading the rest of the market by 32 points overall, at 82 to 50. Yet it is in terms of Benefits &amp; Impact that the gulf between Innovation Leaders and the rest of the market is most pronounced. Leaders scored 65 points at this stage, while the rest of the market trailed at 25. Measurement is one key element: the Index shows that 73 percent of Innovation Leaders implement performance indicators encompassing workflows and business processes critical to the success of innovative development. A mere 38 percent of the rest of the market follow suit.
Leaders also continuously monitor, evaluate and look for improvements. They do this by assessing changes in the ratios of innovation outputs to inputs, the mix of different types of innovation investments and their related risks. They also know the value of customer feedback. Ninety percent of Innovation Leaders get feedback from customers through online and offline channels, versus 43 percent of the rest of South African businesses. “Despite challenges associated in measuring innovation, leaders find ways of measuring and monitoring innovation performance across the value chain stages.” concluded Seedat.
Innovation in 2018 and beyond
Innovation has to become a more central part of South Africa’s economic growth model and the need to foster a business climate and culture conducive to breed innovation is vital. For South African companies, innovation follow-through – by implementing innovation strategy – will prove critical in the coming years, the Index notes. To gear up for 2018 and beyond, the Index encourages all SA companies to take note of how Innovation Leaders enable, measure and drive success.
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About Accenture 
Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Combining unmatched experience and specialised skills across more than 40 industries and all business functions – underpinned by the world’s largest delivery network – Accenture works at the intersection of business and technology to help clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their stakeholders. With more than 425,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. Visit us at <a href="http://www.accenture.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.accenture.com</a>.
Contact:
Jonathan Mahapa
Accenture
+ 27 11 208 3947
<a href="mailto:jonathan.mahapa@accenture.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">jonathan.mahapa@accenture.com</a>

South Africa Needs To Innovate Faster To Ensure Stable Economic Growth – Accenture’s Innovation Index 2017 Shows

In its research report on financial technology (FinTech), The Future of FinTech and Banking, Accenture signalled that the revolution is well under way. The report indicated that global investment in FinTech companies had tripled to $12.2 billion last year, up from $4 billion in the previous year. Although it said Africa was lagging behind, the continent holds a lot of promise.
In the latest report by WorldRemit, Currency Cloud and Ixaris, titled Payments Innovation Jury Report 2015, Africa is seen as more promising than the traditional financial capitals of the world.
The digital revolution is not new in Africa. Mobile payment systems on the continent have set the pace internationally. The extraordinary story of M-Pesa, which in just six years enabled more than 15 million Kenyans to send and receive money electronically, is a good example. With more than 140 million registered accounts, mobile payments in Africa are quickly becoming mainstream. M-Pesa’s recent innovations, such as M-Shwari, a mobile bank account which facilitated loans worth of more than $200 million in Kenya last year, is set to continue blazing a trail in global FinTech innovation.
The remittance market is another important area for African FinTech. With the amount of money sent to sub-Saharan Africa via mobile phones set to hit $33 billion this year, it is easy to see why this market is attractive. Innovation is expected to bring down remittance charges, which currently stand at twice the global average according to the Overseas Development Institute, an independent think tank. Innovators, such as MFS Africa, are honing in on the intra-African remittance market, where remittances can rise up to 20% of face value. World Bank figures indicate that $11 billion is sent within Africa each year and African companies are taking advantage of the 650 million mobile phone subscriptions to tap into this field.
Agriculture is another sector being invaded by FinTech. Already, several innovations are bringing financial access points closer to the farmer. E-wallet in Nigeria allows farmers to receive subsidised seed and fertiliser vouchers on their mobile phones. Likewise, Intellect Tech in Kenya is helping farmers and insurance firms track compensation claims. With proven success, it’s not surprising that funding has followed. In June, two start-ups were awarded $50,000 through Village Capital FinTech for Agriculture: East Africa 2015.
Despite the obvious success, there are still many barriers for FinTech in Africa. One key obstacle is regulation. Africa has more than 50 countries, each with their own regulations, resulting in restricted capital flow, like the exchange control that is still in place in South Africa. Another issue is the focus on local problems – innovators need to realize that FinTech is part a global ecosystem. Nonetheless, Africa still faces a massive opportunity to lead the way in the FinTech evolution.
Although funding was a major barrier in the past, the situation is slowly improving. Incubation hubs have sprung up all over Africa, kick-starting the next generation of technologists. Rand Merchant Insurance (RMI) in South Africa has a club called AlphaCode that helps provide networking opportunities for the local FinTech entrepreneurs. Recently, Barclays Bank Kenya launched an innovation lab that will provide a base for local developers to come up with game-changing ideas that will change the future of the financial industry. All this makes the sector an attractive option for investors. Investment in FinTech companies is expected to double to $8 billion in 2018, according to Accenture.
With a young population set to explode in the coming decades, Africa is positioned to benefit from financial innovation. FinTech is making essential services more accessible to the wider population. The African companies providing these services are on the march and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop them.

Tag: Accenture

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Africa’s Top 30 Tech Start-Ups Opens for Entries

South Africa Needs To Innovate Faster To Ensure Stable Economic Growth – Accenture’s Innovation Index 2017 Shows

A Revolution on the march