Leadership, Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Acknowledgements and Greetings

I wish to thank the organisers of the Vodafone African Business Leaders Forum for the honour done us at Ishmael Yamson & Associates by the invitation to present this paper on Leadership, Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

This topic offers the perfect basis to share some of our thoughts and viewpoints and hopefully add value to leaders seeking to grow and prosper their organisations in a fast-changing world through entrepreneurship and innovation.

Who Are We

Ishmael Yamson & Associates is a consulting firm that specializes in business and organizational transformation and leadership development. We help leaders in organisations to respond rightly to the numerous and complex set of global and local challenges that confront them.

We help our clients to look beyond the immediate future, unearth unique capabilities, create value for sustained growth, and in partnering with clients to create market leaders and outstanding organisations.

Defining Leadership, Entrepreneurship and Innovation

The over-riding focus private sector development strategies in our continent are “to develop a thriving private sector that creates jobs and enhances livelihoods for all”. Whilst together entrepreneurs and innovators “create jobs” and “enhance livelihoods” they are not to be mistaken in the roles they play in sustainable value-creation and building prosperity.

i) Leadership

Leadership nurtures both entrepreneurship and innovation and is a key plank in every growth and development strategy. It is at the centre of every successful organisation, driving delivery of the organisational mandate by nurturing the culture, values and behaviours of the organisation and people whom they lead, in a manner consistent with a common vision and strategy.

All leaders in organisations must develop the capacity to continually respond to the ever-changing nature, scale, and scope as well as the pace of change taking place in the economy, social structures, technology, and the global environment in ways that keep their organisations, brands, and products and services relevant to stakeholders.

ii) Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship happens when business people, industrialists and owners of capital create a burning platform clearly showing viable market opportunities and then take economic decisions and actions to enhance or preserve value. This “last refuge of the troublemaking individual ” is therefore as much a necessity in our public sector it is the rule for the private sector. Entrepreneurship is nowadays widely accepted as vital for driving job creation and economic growth by developing new markets for new products and services and expanding employment which boosts consumption GDP growth.

iii) Innovation

Innovations respond to burning platforms with alternatives and new market spaces based on products, services or process solutions. Your organisation has in it today all the ideas needed to transform it into a story of radical success. This is the spark of innovation. However, many organizations lack the fertile ground in which to nurture, develop and implement ideas. The degree, to which an organisation innovates, directly correlates to how successful it will be. Traditionally innovation has been limited to products. However, in today’s highly competitive economic environment, innovation must expand to all parts and processes in an organization’s value chain to drive dynamic, relevant and sustained growth.

The questions for business leaders are whether their organization knows how to manage innovation, and how quickly and effectively they can harvest the benefits of the ideas for maximum returns.

Impact of Leadership, Entrepreneurship and Innovators

In preparing this paper I read that “there is a tendency for emerging economies to over-emphasise the virtues of trading as symptomatic of entrepreneurial instincts in Africans.” However, “vast flea and vegetable markets in Cairo, Casablanca, Accra, Nairobi, Lusaka, Harare and Johannesburg cannot be a credible litmus test for successful business, because, they do not contribute to real economic development.”

I beg to differ. Leadership, entrepreneurship and innovation combined in these vast informal markets can bring massive changes across industry and commerce, and entire economies.

Imagine that the management of one such open market defined its mandate to include:

(a) competing with all other market managements to attract the

? largest organised/managed concentration of capital for trading and commerce

? most experienced and successful owners of trading enterprises

(b) creating unique and differentiating services such as;

? access to a unique skill set in Category and Channel management, and trade marketing

? access to planning, buying and in-bound logistics services

? guaranteed access to the most stable supplies of competitively priced agri-products and manufactured goods, and

? the most attractive finance costs and (access to) banking services,

(c) offering measurable best-in-class shopper experiences vis-a-vis other major markets, and

(d) community development on the back of attracting investments in the trading and commercial activities centred around the market

This mandate should open up endless burning platform possibilities for entrepreneurs and innovators to create and market new business solutions in communications, financial products, shopper experience, retail branding, physical and transactions security products, etcetera, etcetera.

That people in leadership in Africa understand this power to unleash entrepreneurship and innovation is critical for the future success of Africa in the global system. But for Africa to thrive in entrepreneurship and innovation it will need leadership that also recognizes that durable success requires that innovation is ‘owned’ through a differentiated identity or branding that can enduringly define and dominate a market space.

In the example I just gave, there are opportunities for;

i) geographic brands that help boost the economies producing certain agri-products,

ii) lifestyle branding for shopping experiences and social mobility concepts, as well as

iii) brands that continually create and solve product and service needs in response to consumer trends.

The question is why so little transformation is happening if these opportunities for leadership, entrepreneurship and innovation abound?

Missed Opportunities: Differentiation Is Not Enough

Local sweets are a huge industry across many Asian markets but the favourite toffees of many an African child and family (like wapi and Black and White toffees in Ghana) never even became sub-regional success stories. Whilst the Indian sari is increasingly a fabric of choice in many African markets, Kente has stayed a niche cotton fabric unable to achieve global commercial success or penetrate the silk fabric segment. Africa increasingly exports fruit but is unable to revive old fruit juice success stories like Sunspot and ASTEK in Ghana.

Why Entrepreneurship and Innovation fail

Why have these differentiated identities and brands that once defined our lives disappeared? Some answers lie in these factors behind failed ventures in entrepreneurship and innovation:

i) Inability to respond to trends or manage rapid growth

I can remember Saturday Night talcum powder and joromi. Trend icons that got stuck in a “this is it” attitude once success was achieved and failed to conquer new territories within the Saturday nightlife and African fashion. Today that Saturday night space is probably best owned by a brand called Axe and the world of African fashion is dominated by designs crafted in Holland and fabrics from China and India.

ii) No market development for revolutionary concepts / Insignificant education to support an enterprise or innovation that defines a new market

In 2005 Ghana hailed pozzolana cement as a breakthrough in the housing industry. In 2011 the industry succumbed. Somehow, the business and the scientific community that developed it never succeed in persuading Ghanaians to build stronger houses for less.

iii) Unmet expectations

Ghana was briefly in the ’80s on the cusp of a local shoe manufacturing industry whose contribution to innovation were ingenious, visually flawless copies of international brands that felt frighteningly like the real deal. Except, no one, it turned out, had any desire to own a shoe that would not last six months. Trix or ma trick i wo as they came to be known turned out to be a solution still-born.

iv) Designing ‘for’ instead of ‘with’ consumers

From pay-tv to telecom operators and utilities, brand owners have seen businesses boom with the introduction of prepaid subscription business models. ‘Prepaid’ is an operationally brilliant innovation, boosting business profits and sustainability. What no one does is factor in the cost of money to the customer. If one provider or utility responded to this imbalance in the relationship with customers and gave them a value to represent interest on prepaid income every other business built on prepaid income would follow suit. For now, consumers wait to see a business that has benefitted from their upfront payments and which is also willing to share value.

Leadership! Entrepreneurship!! Innovation!!! - A Better Approach

There is no magic bullet but let me encourage every leader, innovator and entrepreneur here with these words of novelist Winston Churchill - “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”. Each of the themes explored is truly a process that requires leaders, entrepreneurs and innovators to master these elements of success:

i) Embrace messengers

ii) Promote experimentation

iii) Cultivate a culture of confidence

iv) Frame the desired outcome accurately

v) Put difficulties and failures into perspective

vi) Encourage collaborators to put facts on the table

vii) Set clear boundaries and hold people accountable

viii) Take personal responsibility for delivering the vision

ix) Demand the discipline showing evidence of practice and preparation,

x) Acknowledge that every leader, team, concept or business limits to capacity and ability

A Final Word

Not all leadership, innovation or entrepreneurship will result in outstanding feats and outcomes but for “the ones who work on advances by walking one step at a time, backwards into the unknown, listening and responding to the reality they discover on the road called Why”, I encourage you with these words, “if you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way .”

Thank you for giving me your attention and good luck on your journey.

- M Harry Yamson, Vodafone African Busines Leaders Forum, Nov 2011