Is there a lack of online innovation in South Africa?
I’ve come to a conclusion (not “the” conclusion) that there are, broadly-speaking, two different approaches to building an online business (or even building new online businesses within an existing one). Its something I’ve been thinking about, trying to distill examples of ideas, strategies and executions into distinct approaches.
A CNET news.com interview with Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake about building communities helped put some of my thinking into something logical:
Fake speaks about being inside Yahoo! and trying to build new things and experiment… This is obviously not the easiest thing in the world, largely due to a company like Yahoo!’s size and corporate culture.
She speaks about being tasked with building new things:
At Yahoo!, I joined the technology development group–new products, innovation, culture and rapid development. These were our mandate. And the guy who runs the division, Jeff Weiner, said, “How can we build the next Flickr at Yahoo?” I laughed and said, “No way, Jose, that will ever happen here.”
And she’s solved it. Well, at least she’s grappled with the complexity of the task and come up with some strategies. And most people involved seem to work this way instinctively, the strategies are almost blindingly obvious, but she’s framed them very well.
There is one kind of process developed for building and maintaining large-scale products, like Yahoo! Mail. And the development processes for that are very different from what it takes to build a new product in a short amount of time…
If you have 200 million mail clients, you need structure, reliability, uptime and dependability. Those things are very different from launch fast, take risks and embrace failure. Bureaucracy has its purpose, which is to keep the trains running on time. But building in small teams and launching early and often, bugs and all, is a very different proposition.
She likens the approaches to a supertanker versus a speedboat.
And this is really the point of this post: I don’t necessarily feel the South African online landscape is that ready/willing/eager to take risks with projects. We’re seeing deep-pocketed, well-researched, scaled launches of web properties in SA that media companies are prepared to back and make work. There’s little innovation and an attitude of “well, this user-generated content thing has worked overseas, let’s get our audience to write us letters”.
Maybe recent developments driven chiefly by Vincent Maher at the M&G have sparked a trend? I hope so.
I do think that the approach of the M&G (which Vincent describes to Bizcommunity this morning) to be a facilitator is a riskier one (than simply being a content producer). It means the M&G online will in all probability be launching lots of new platforms, new sites, new ways to aggregate and display content. He might not agree with my assumptions here, though I’m guessing he will.
Maybe some of them won’t succeed. Others (like Amatomu) will almost certainly become huge successes.
Take the risks.
capdog Mar 28
I think you’re right, but it comes down to audience. There aren’t enough people using broadband in SA to make these kind of projects viable. And those who do use the internet regularly, use it for business needs like banking (just check the google top searches by country for that).
The trick is to work around the limitations of the SA market. For example, a great startup is Mxit, they nailed a niche that is essentially created by the high price of communications.