Impactful innovation across Africa requires a concerted effort according to MTN South Africa's CIO who has expressed his desire to form partnerships both within MTN and outside the company in order to maximise the potential of new ideas.

Seven months into his role at MTN after leaving Discovery Health, Benjamin Marais has now hosted a successful TadHack event at the mobile operator's Johannesburg headquarters (which coincided with a similar first-time launch in Zambia) - although he cautions that this is only a bit of what is required to make a lasting difference to Africa's innovation ecosystem.

"We set out a few things that we wanted to achieve. One was getting greater visibility and to bring smart developers together to solve Africa's problems. I think we did that because I saw that one of our teams got the TadHack global award over and above the prizes we gave. We also wanted to get collaboration with people from different parts of the industry including our vendors like ZTE, Huawei, IBM etc. Some of the teams ended up using their platforms which I thought was very good. When TadHack came to us at the beginning of the year what caught my eye was that it is a global event that can help reignite innovation at MTN, South Africa and all around Africa."

Marais says energy saving solutions and ways to maximise resources through IoT, as well as improvements to water supply and transport, do well to bring attention to the different challenges, but collaboration can help them go even further.

"If you think you have a new idea you are probably one of a few people that have already had that idea, and from that perspective MobiMoola will probably add to solutions in transport. We need to work with our enterprise business unit because they have the different contacts in government who can help us see if we can find some ways to collaborate. What you often find is that if you add ideas together and incorporate parts from other solutions, you are able to refine it. The concept of payment, as MobiMoola shows, is not totally new but what I thought was great is the ease of use and simplicity."

Marais adds that while he has had informal discussions with members of his executive team, and the plan is to roll out TadHack in additional countries in Africa in 2017.

"For me the lesson is to collaborate some more. I saw a tweet that TadHack reached 2600 registrations globally and that is quite a nice pool because hackathons are not big events and have forty or fifty people and that is a worldwide phenomenon. What makes this big is how the smaller events can come together. What we need to see - and this is something we can discuss with TadHack themselves - is how we can collaborate better. It is one thing to see someone in another country executing an idea, but we need to come together and enhance these ideas because there will be a few that overlap. I think we can do that next year and that will add to the experience. Having previously worked for FNB and Discovery I am aware of how these type of events are are catalysts for innovation and that they can also add to innovation within a company."

Mobile Moola in South Africa, and App-Close in Zambia were identified as the overall winners at TadHack.