by Paula Eugenio-Ferreira
Twenty years on, the Technology Top 100 Awards (TT100) drew almost thirty voluntary adjudicators who remain eager and more excited than ever to participate in the entrant adjudication sessions of one of South Africa’s premier business awards programme. For some, like me, it has been their first year to adjudicate TT100 entrants, while others return year after year, as they witness in awe just a hint of the talent that this country so proudly possesses.
All of the adjudicators are either professionals, academics, captains of industry or experts in their fields from various backgrounds, who part with their valuable time and expertise not only to adjudicate but also to impart their knowledge by assisting entrants, particularly those from the emerging sector, to reflect on areas of their business that they perhaps have overlooked.
Similarly, with the established sector entrants, adjudicators have been faced with companies that have also hit stalemate areas in their organisation that require solutions to more complex challenges. Although it is not the responsibility or role of an adjudicator to look into such challenges or even potential opportunities that have perhaps gone
unnoticed by entrants, they merely ask questions that facilitate entrants into looking at their organisations from a birds-eye-view and to gain new perspectives, often ‘making the pennies drop’.
Ask any adjudicator what they derived the most pleasure from at their entrant presentations and their responses are usually based around how they marvel over the innovations and the impressive high calibre of entrants. Gauteng adjudicator and CEO of Mjoli Development Company, Nhlanhla Mjoli-Mncube, feels that South Africa needs to mobilize more entrepreneurs to invest in the area of innovation and create jobs. “My most impressive discovery was the entrepreneurs who are re-engineering old sectors and coming up with inventions that cut costs and create efficiencies, previously dreamed of, while maintaining quality and confidentiality,” says Mjoli-Mncube.
Contradictory to this, adjudicator’s have also observed emerging companies losing site of the commercialisation of their innovations with some very new small businesses being caught in an ‘analysis paralysis’ frame of mind as far as their innovations are concerned. Adjudicators have commented on how a number of entrants have invested both time and money, self-funded and donated, into elements of
EDGE | November 2011 23
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