INNOVATE™ South Africa

“Innovation” has become a buzzword in businesses the world over. It evokes images of tech bros playing foosball in the office, of millennials taking team calls through AirPods while on the treadmill, and of AI-enhanced systems that can solve problems better than humans. Certainly, a business keeping up with tech...

I TRAVELLED TO ANFIELD JUST BEFORE THE HARD LOCKDOWN. I’M A HUGE LIVERPOOL FAN AND WANTED TO WATCH THE TEAM PLAY AT HOME BEFORE THEY WON THE LEAGUE, WHICH – FORTUNATELY – THEY DID. SO I RETURNED HOME ON A HIGH, BUT THEN GLOBAL AND LOCAL SPORT CAME TO A...

Mixed reality continues to grow exponentially because of its ability to help businesses and their employees complete crucial tasks faster, safer, and more efficiently. It also creates new ways to connect to customers and partners by blending the physical and digital worlds so that they coexist and interact in real-time....

Shout-It-Now (Shout) is an innovative social enterprise, empowering youth to own their sexuality. We concentrate on hard to reach communities; we go to the places where they are, provide services they want, in such a way that they choose to keep coming back. We are a local South African organisation...

When Tara Turkington, CEO of marketing agency Flow Communications, was asked to arrange a visit for a few people to South Africa, nobody realised it was the genesis of something remarkable. Flow Travel organises exciting, immersive trips for small groups to wherever our guests lead us. We like to do...

“Inno-gration”? For IntegerHotspot’s, true innovation, founded in full integration, has informed the approach and ethos since day one. And has afforded the agency an edge since before certain interpretations of “integration” infiltrated agency zeitgeist. THE INTEGRATION ARCHETYPEIntegerHotspot’s was founded in 1999 by advertising maverick, Di Wilson as Pod Communications. From...

Data is the source of all learning, and nothing should get in the way of that. Data should be easy to access and explore. We spend too long working on our data instead of with our data. Data tells a story, and it’s our job to unearth and tell that...

Mahlako a Phahla, founded by sisters Makole Mupita and Meta Mhlarhi, is named after our mother Mahlako to pay homage to her pioneering and entrepreneurial spirit in building a successful family business at a time when it was difficult for many black people to do so.   Mahlako is an...

A painting pig from Farm Sanctuary SA is hogging the limelight and inspiring animal lovers to make the connection between what they eat and the industries that they support.   When South African Joanne Lefson rescued a small piglet from a local industrialized hog facility in 2016, she knew this...

Young girls can dare to dream big and aspire to greatness. Rene Naylor has 130 caps as part of the Springbok Rugby’s medical and management team. While Naylor is a physiotherapist, she is also a motivational speaker taking her story to girls and boys from all walks of life in...

With experience in oil & gas, mining & metallurgy, infrastructure, petrochemical and clean power our team of experts perform structural, mechanical, electrical, instrumentation, piping, platework (SMEIPP), tank, fabrication and management services for projects of all sizes and complexities within the company’s two business units, Construction and Turnarounds & Maintenance. The...

For more than 100 years, Tiger Brands has produced some of South Africa’s most loved quality brands from culinary favourites like Jungle Oats, All Gold Tomato Sauce and Black Cat Peanut Butter, to personal care products. But as much as these have become staples in local homes, which we are...

The world is obsessed with changing businesses for good. Ask the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship South Africa (Branson Centre) for its take on that, and it’ll tell you that is actually a misnomer. Fundamentally, business is good. The focus of the Branson Centre is entrepreneurialism and social responsibility. The Branson...

Retail Capital was born in 2011 as an idea on a white napkin. Those drawings became the framework of what ended up being the first Merchant Cash Advance (MCA) product for businesses in South Africa. Driven by a deep passion to support the SME sector, Retail Capital has since innovated...

Just over eight years ago the founder of YIEDI, Jayshree Naidoo and Jay Naidoo her business and life partner, sat across from a branding expert and outlined the vision for the company. They went on to describe a model that they had created, it was still drawn on a napkin...

When Michelin star chef Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen first laid eyes on Boscia House, a one-hundred-year-old farmhouse situated at the beautiful Tswalu Kalahari in the Northern Cape, he saw the vastness of the region as a canvas on which to create something special. Worlds away from the beautiful waters...

Where do brands and marketers look to understand middle-class consumers go to find actionable, realistic, useful data? That was the question the team at WhyFive Insights asked almost a decade ago when they launched a unique annual survey and data set called BrandMapp. “We were working in media at the...

FLOW IS DEMOCRATISING THE REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY’S ARCHAIC OPERATING MODEL FOR AGENTS, EMPOWERING THEM IN A DIGITAL WORLD AND GIVING BUYER, SELLER AND AGENT THE BENEFIT OF A BETTER, MORE TRANSPARENT AND COST-EFFECTIVE PROCESS. THE FACE OF TECHNOLOGY CAN STILL BE HUMAN – AND FLOW MAKES SURE THAT ESTATE AGENTS...

Global e-Talent Pty Ltd (GeT) is a young Sandton, Johannesburg-based talent search, placement, and onboarding firm. It partners with both private and public organisations, to meet their talent acquisition needs and that such talent is adequately integrated into their business. Behind the conventional recruitment agency, behind it sits a very...

In a world where data has become the currency of our supposed future resulting in valuations of businesses from zero to billions within a relatively short while, you need to ask yourself this question; How am I benefitting from the data-sets I have in my business, if at all? And...

“Nineteen years ago, Gary Harwood and I were assigned to a project in Lagos, Nigeria, by the large multinational for which we were working. On the evening of the first day of the project, we sat in the hotel bar enjoying an ice-cold local beer and wondered, what on Earth...