SA’s economy is in need of bright ideas

WHAT is the value of an idea?

When that idea is Coca-Cola, a ubiquitous, perennial, and trusted brand for some 133 years? Like Microsoft and Google, brand leaders on a global scale, it started out in its infancy as an idea.

New York University recently conducted a study on finding how new ideas and innovations and rewarding people who initiated them, created sustainable economic growth.

They went on to challenge economists to look at creativity, curiosity and freedom of thought as platforms to jumpstart economic development and job creation through innovation, technology and invention.

There are countless ideas out there waiting to be discovered.

These are drivers of job creation and long-term sustainable growth.

One person discovers an idea and millions of others use it, to live better, work better and relate to one another better, while giving due regard to the environment and all the while creating jobs, driving revenue generation and reducing inequality.

The young, brilliant, vibrant and impressionable minds have this opportunity to excel and introduce new and ground-breaking ideas to grant safe passage for economies through the next 100 years and more.

Economics professor Paul Romer headed this study at New York University. It focused on how the model can work. Job creation failure is a crisis in so many developing economies.

He said: “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” Romer recently shared the 2018 Nobel Prize for Economics for this ground-breaking work.

Google started as an idea and today employs over 80 000 people and continues to grow. Jack Ma’s Alibaba started as an idea and today employs over 70 000 people and still grows.

Toyota started as an idea and today employs close to half a million employees and is a household brand. Mercedez-Benz was started from humble beginnings, to be a powerful global brand, creating and sustaining millions of jobs.

To boot, its slogan, “The Best or Nothing, The Best Knows No Alternative”, remains intact today. The brand suits and matches the product and service.

These success stories have emanated from ideas, and continue to have a global footprint on job creation, brand development and consolidation and revenue generation today.

Ideas do not develop without a conducive environment.

The South African landscape has been characterised for too long by corporates reaping astounding profits while leaving the scraps for the locals.

The mindless accumulation of wealth at all costs continues, while the communities at grassroots do not have a say in their development.

In this there are gaps which are opportunities for brilliant young minds to come up with ideas and innovations to drive their own job creation and development.

Parallel to this, they need to develop brands locally and then consolidate these brands to develop a regional and global footprint.

All global brands started in this manner.

Young, brilliant and innovative minds cannot develop when in 2018 half of those who were unemployed had less than a matric qualification.

Tertiary education and, largely, a technical tertiary education is the key. In 2018, only 2% of graduates were unemployed.

In a recent year, South Africans used over 260 million pairs of shoes, and of this, only 18 million were manufactured here.

We can only keep many jobs if we produce local and buy local. Once we buy foreign goods, which we have, we export our jobs.

Young and brilliant minds need to generate ideas in this regard and quickly.

The Mo Ibrahim Index of Governance recently warned that South Africa’s population would double by 2050 and 60% of it would be under 25. Too high a growth rate by any comparison.

The consequences could be devastating.

It goes further to articulate that 27% of countries in Africa have a declining level of education quality, intensity and viability and South Africa is well in this bracket of despair.

On any given working day, at least 15% of the workforce are absent, which equates to a 17% drop in revenue, a definite gap and opportunity for young and bright innovators to design ideas in terms of productivity, governance and management.

Unilever chief executive Paul Polman said that greater profits emanate from providing a better product for consumers, which increases profit, which attracts better talent, which then in turn creates even better products, which increases revenue and profits as well as creating more jobs.

He said that the real enemy was not exploitation of workers or consumers, but the short-term horizons of many corporates, ie, of increasing profits to favour the executive and shareholders, while consumers and workers languish.

The best approach is to embrace a model where shareholders, executive, workers and consumers benefit.

Young, bright minds must seriously come up with brilliant management frameworks to maximise job creation and sustain businesses in the long term. What is the value of an idea?

Singh is Communications Deputy Director in the KZN Provincial Government but writes in his personal capacity.