South Africa’s senior business executives are upbeat about the benefits of driving innovation in the country and are more than likely than their global counterparts to encourage creative behaviours, a survey of South African executives has revealed.

The South African results of the ‘2014 GE Global Innovation Barometer’ show that senior business executives have an overwhelmingly positive perception of the role innovation plays in society.

Three quarters of respondents agree that people in South Africa live better than ten years ago because of the impact of innovation.

“Overall South Africa does very well and the trends are very positive,” Tim Schweikert, president and CEO of GE South Africa, told the Innovation Summit in Cape Town.

Most South African executives surveyed see small and medium-sized businesses and start-ups as the key drivers of innovation in South Africa, more so than their peers in other parts of the world.

More than three-quarters of the respondents said collaborating with external business partners was a risk worth taking if they wanted to successfully innovate.

Sixty-five per cent of executives report that revenue generated by collaborative innovation activities has been climbing over the past year, while 88% agree that collaboration with start-ups and entrepreneurs will drive innovation success into the future.

Panelists at the Innovation Summit said companies needed to do more to encourage innovation and bring more young people into the fold.

Schweikert said he was pleased to see the Square Kilometre Array as well as investment in local innovation centres and organisations, such as the Silicon Cape Initiative gain traction.

“The drive for innovation across South Africa has never been greater.”

But companies constantly need to adapt.

Trevor Ncube, chairperson of Alpha Media Holdings, which owns four newspaper titles in Zimbabwe, and the Mail & Guardian in South Africa, said the media industry had had to grapple with immense change brought about by innovation.

“We’ve moved from being content providers to little technology companies. We need to keep abreast of the changes all of the time. We’ve realised so many people are reading us on their cellphones. We have to work out how to make money from smartphones. It’s something we’re grappling with, but we’re adapting to change. We’ve moved from being victims to players.”

South African business leaders see big data as critical to understanding customers and anticipating the market, with two thirds agreeing that it’s critical to use the ‘predictive knowledge’ gained from analysing big data to innovate successfully. They are also more prepared to harness big data than their global counterparts.

Nearly all (96%) of executives in South Africa agree that innovation is increasingly becoming a global game, merging talents and ideas across the world.

But South Africa still has some red flags in some areas.

Around a third of South African executives identify a lack of talent as limiting innovation – a figure higher than the global average of 22%. There is also some concern that South Africans are not scaling up successful innovations to a wider or international market.