Following weeks of adjudication, Accenture and The Da Vinci Institute announced winners of this year’s Innovation Index at the Accenture Innovation Conference held in Johannesburg today. The awards ceremony honoured businesses – regardless of their sizes – for spearheading innovation in their own industries.

“All respondents were evaluated according to areas of innovation maturity,” said Ntombi Mhangwani, the director of Integrated Marketing & Communications at Accenture. This ranged from ability to innovate throughout the value chain, from concept through to commercialisation; commitment to the project across the organisation, including senior management; and ability to make use of ever evolving technology, in all its forms, as a way of improving customer value, operational procedures as well as creating new revenue streams.

The 2016 Accenture Innovation Index winners are:

Overall Innovation Master (turnover in excess of R35m): SSG Consulting

For their revolutionary cloud based Business and Project Management solution with exceptional capabilities to handle workflow, data, documents, dashboards, KPI's, business and staff optimisation together with upskilling. SSG Consulting’s KEY360 solution is able to cater for over 100 processes via either mobile or multi-company access.

Overall Innovation Master (turnover less than R35m): Colony HQ

For their online aggregation and database platform that translates big data into little data, allowing clients to communicate with their customers making use of relevant messaging at the right time.

Top Innovative Concept (turnover in excess of R35 million): Purple Group – Easy Equities

For their Bundles that allows the investors to invest in a basket of shares. It provides access to a predetermined stock selection created by respected fund managers and CIO’s from some of South Africa’s top financial service providers.

Top Innovative Concept (emerging organisation): Standard Microgrid

For their mini-utility solution that utilises a combination of solar photovoltaic, energy storage, cloud based grid management and granular demand side management devices to transform a rural off-grid village into a hyper efficient group of networked smart homes.

The overall findings of the Accenture Innovation Index showed only marginal growth in innovation among South African companies, with 57% of respondents found to be laggards, 29% acting as leaders in innovation and 8% serving as innovation value champions seeing a return on innovation of over 40%.

“If South Africa hopes to continue in the 21^st Century, the pace at which the nation is innovating needs to accelerate going forward,” said Mhangwani.

This year, three key themes – Engagement, Resources and Digital – have gained momentum and emerged as receiving stronger focus by innovation leaders and value champions in South Africa.

Engagement, defined as the workforce of a company who are invested in their daily work, grew by 7% in 2016. About 70%of employees view innovation as a critical part of their job. The index also shows that 78% of companies encourage innovative thinking from employees.

Resources – defined as financial and human capital, as well as marking use of sources, relationships and the workforce to generate ideas and facilitate innovation – dimension significantly increased by 20 points to 55% in 2016. The index shows that 71% of leaders allow for innovative ideas to come from outside their organisations.

Digital – defined by the evolution of the business to use new combinations of technology, information and connectivity to create new sources of customer value, revenue as well as operational performance – remains a key driver of innovation with 85% of innovation leaders using analytics to drive innovation.

As part of the adjudication process, index partners – including The Da Vinci Institute, TransUnion and other innovation practitioners – met with and interviewed the top organisations to ultimately determine the finalists and winners. The top four winners were selected from a total of 20 finalists announced last month.

All winners will receive a customised innovation diagnostic that identifies innovation gaps and strengths, provides a benchmark by turnover and sector, and includes strategies that may help them to improve their businesses and gain competitive advantage.

The Accenture Innovation Index, launched two years ago, has as its goal to drive and grow innovation, in all its forms. It provides organisations with a customised innovative diagnostic report, allowing respondents to identify both its innovation strengths and gaps, together with potential strategies moving forward. In addition to what it affords respondents, and largely because of it, The Accenture Innovation Index is also able to provide an invaluable objective benchmark of the state of innovation in South Africa.

“At Accenture, we remain committed to spearheading innovation,” continued Mhangwani. “We believe that the annual Innovation Index enables this, allowing us to deliver a positive contribution not only to the various organisations involved but, similarly, to the broader subject of innovation in our country. Our heartfelt thanks and congratulations to all participants over the last few months, and today’s winners.”

Registration for the Accenture Innovation Index 2017 is now open. For more information, please visit: www.theinnovationindex.com.

This month's business articles sponsored by Drive Control Corporation: