Andile Ngcaba interviewed about innovation at Department of Scie
Andile Ngcaba interviewed about innovation at Department of Scie
Andile Ngcaba, Chairman of Convergence Partners, spoke at the Department of Science and Technology’s (DST) Science, Technology and Innovation Summit this past weekend. Andile formed part of a panel tasked with addressing ‘Research and Development investment in South Africa: The challenges and opportunities’.
Andile began his presentation by discussing the relationship between innovation and language, highlighting the critical role of ‘dead languages’ such as Greek and Latin in the development of the sciences, law and philosophy. This background was central to his thesis, which asked how Africans were expected to innovate in ICTs when coding languages, and the internet by extension, were not in their native tongues.
Andile then examined changing business models in the innovation ecosystem. He indicated that government-owned research entities had started outsourcing their R&D by funding start ups and making use of innovation that stems from there. Examples he cited were the ongoing relationship between In-Q-Tel and Palantir, as well as NASA’s relationship with Google and SpaceX. Andile asked what this shifting landscape portended for South Africa’s Science Councils and parastatals.
Andile discussed the global context of Silicon Valley’s ecosystem, and argued that South Africa, and the rest of the Continent, needed public and private sector collaboration and joint R&D strategies. He went on to say that African countries needed to create and support their own ecosystem, so as to not fall behind the innovation curve. He emphasized the need for Africans to develop their own natural language processing (NLP) capabilities and build language infrastructure, so as to take advantage of the deluge of big data that is upon us.