Explore how understanding the unique challenges of the South African market can lead to innovative solutions in entrepreneurship, proving that the road to success is often more important than the idea itself.
Image: Supplied
I have heard the phrase "don't reinvent the wheel" used in entrepreneurship conversations as both advice and dismissal as a counsel against wasted effort and, sometimes, as a gentle way of telling someone that their idea is not as original as they believe it to be.
What the phrase rarely does is ask the more useful follow-up question: what is the road like?
Because the wheel, as a piece of engineering, is largely solved. But the road the infrastructure of distribution, access, culture, and context through which any product or service must travel to reach its customer is different in every market and is almost never solved in the way that outsiders assume it to be.
This distinction matters enormously in the South African context, and more broadly across the African continent, where many of the most important entrepreneurship questions are not questions about what to build but questions about how to build it for a specific person in a specific place with a specific set of constraints.
The mobile money revolution that transformed financial inclusion across East Africa was not a new idea about money.
For example, M-Pesa did not reinvent the concept of transfer or payment.
What it did was understand, with exceptional depth, the road the specific conditions under which millions of people moved money, the distrust of formal banking, the reliance on mobile networks, the social context of transactions between people who knew each other and designed an infrastructure that worked within those conditions rather than against them.
The lesson is not that innovation is unnecessary. It is that the most consequential innovation is often invisible at the level of the product and entirely visible at the level of the system.
The product, money transfer, was familiar.
The system; how it was accessed, priced, distributed, and trusted was genuinely new. And the founders who identified the gap were not asking "what has never existed?"
They were asking "what exists, but does not reach this person, and why?"
That second question is harder to answer, requires more genuine knowledge of a specific context, and produces solutions that are more durable precisely because they are more rooted.
The most consequential innovation is often invisible at the level of the product and entirely visible at the level of the system.
What has never been built is sometimes less interesting than what has never been made to work here, for this person, at this price.
South Africa's entrepreneurial landscape is full of examples of this kind of contextual innovation, businesses that did not invent their category but that understood their specific customer and market so well that they built something that the category's existing players had never managed to build.
The taxi industry, for all of its informality and all of the policy conversations about formalisation, is a masterclass in contextual understanding.
It reached customers that formal public transport never could, in timescales that formal public transport never matched, at prices that the market could bear, not because it invented a new form of transportation but because it understood the road.
Every subsequent innovation in urban mobility in this country has had to reckon with that understanding.
What this means for a founder making the decision about what to build is that the question "has this been done before?" is less useful than the question "has this been done for this specific customer, in this specific context, at this specific price?"
The answer to the second question is almost always "not well enough."
And "not well enough" is a far more generative starting point than "not at all," because it is grounded in real evidence in the actual experience of actual customers who have tried the existing options and found them wanting in specific, nameable ways.
The road metaphor extends further than it might initially appear. Roads in South Africa are not uniform.
The road that a distribution network uses to reach a customer in Sandton is a fundamentally different infrastructure challenge from the road that serves a customer in a township on the outskirts of a small town in the Eastern Cape.
This is obvious when stated plainly. And yet the business models that get celebrated, funded, and written about tend to be built for the first road and then described as solutions to challenges that exist on the second.
The gap between those two roads; in infrastructure, in purchasing power, in cultural context, in digital access, in trust in formal institutions is not a gap that a product alone can bridge. It requires a system built specifically for the conditions of the road being traveled.
The founder who builds that system is not reinventing the wheel.
They are doing something in some ways more demanding, they are understanding the road well enough to build the infrastructure that makes the wheel work on it.
That understanding does not emerge from a hackathon or a customer persona exercise.
It emerges from proximity, from the kind of sustained, genuine engagement with a specific context that produces insight you cannot get from a market research report.
It is, ultimately, the most important form of innovation available to a founder in this economy. Not what has never existed. What has never been made to work here.
Londani Mpharalala, Research and Impact Coordinator at 22 On Sloane.
Londani Mpharalala, Research and Impact Coordinator at 22 On Sloane.
Image: Supplied.
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