Innovators from across Africa, who recently participated in the three-day My World of Tomorrow (MWOT) conference, say collaboration is the key to unlock opportunities on the continent.

The conference, held recently in Johannesburg, brought together start-ups, SMMEs, corporates and ordinary members of the public to create what organisers describe as a movement of African people sharing and discovering the solutions to everyday problems.

Dean Hodgskiss, founder of Lookseedo, an app that facilitates communication between experts and people in remote areas to fix or make use of complex equipment, spoke to ITWeb Africa during the event.

"From the beginning we designed the app to work in very bad data connections ... and that is why it is different from other solutions around the world because it works even if you have an Edge connection or a GPRS connection, and that is the kind of thing that can make a big difference in Africa because it gets people on the ground to learn more about equipment they are working on and improves productivity as well as giving people on-the-job training."

Hodgskiss was happy to meet other companies and entrepreneurs at the event.

"It has been fantastic, there are some very exciting things and I think the key take away for me is how many other companies are using high tech technology to change Africa. They are developing for Africa because of the value that the high-tech stuff can bring and that is the same with us because we are using 3D models and virtual reality environments. These cutting edge innovations can bring a big difference especially when it comes to training people and upskilling others. We want to meet other people in industry who can use our app."

Cross sector collaboration

The opportunity to work in partnership on rolling out innovative ideas across sectors is one of the most valuable outcomes of a meeting such as the My World of Tomorrow conference according to David Howe, Lead Software Engineer for a low cost smartphone clinical hearing test named hearScreen.

Invented at the University of Pretoria and now in a separate commercial partnership with Vodacom, the innovation is being steered towards partnerships with governments across Africa to expand reach.

"Vodacom is a distribution partner and we are looking at getting into government and we are in discussions with the department of health. The CSIR has also developed an electronic health record for South Africa and we are the first audiological service to integrate with that record. We are in the beginning phases of CE approval and looking to branch into the US as well and we will go through FDA approval for that. hearScreen is a patented solution," said Howe.

Multinationals including HP and Lenovo, as well as government groups for innovation such as the South African Government's Technology Innovation Agency, participated in the conference .