This moment marks the dawn of what experts call superintelligence, the machine learning capabilities that could one day surpass human performance in nearly every domain” comments Daniel Novitzkas, chairman of Specno, Africa’s leading digital innovation agency.

According to Novitzkas, the question is no longer if this future will arrive, but what form it will take, and who it will serve.

“If superintelligence is centralised in the hands of governments and global corporations, human agency will shrink. We risk becoming passive consumers in a system designed for profit and control. But if we build AI as personal superintelligence – or PSI – we can unlock a future that multiplies human potential rather than diminish it,” argues Novitzkas.

Centralised AI, he explains, risks entrenching monopolies of information, wealth, and power. The alternative – personal superintelligence – offers a decentralised system that belongs to individuals and is tailored to their unique goals, values, and strengths. Rather than dissolving individuality in the pursuit of efficiency, PSI would magnify diversity, giving people the tools to learn, create, and innovate on their own terms.

“The potential applications of PSI are vast. A student struggling with dyslexia could learn through an AI tutor designed precisely for their cognitive style.

A farmer in Limpopo could receive real-time, personalised guidance on soil health and weather conditions. A young musician could collaborate with an AI attuned to their creative rhythm, while a personalised health coach could continuously monitor biometrics, predicting and preventing illness years before symptoms appear” states Novitzkas. 

“Personal superintelligence isn’t about replacing people – it’s about augmenting them,” he explains. “The student still learns, the entrepreneur still builds, the farmer still farms, but each with supercharged capacity.”

For Africa, the implications are profound. Just as mobile phones allowed the continent to leapfrog landline infrastructure, PSI could democratise access to world-class expertise, placing tutors, doctors, and business advisors directly into the hands of millions. 

Communities once excluded from global opportunities could find themselves at the cutting edge of human capability. Yet the danger is equally clear: if personal superintelligence is ignored, the future will default to centralisation, calcifying inequality and entrenching dominance in the hands of a few.

“This debate can’t stay confined to Silicon Valley,” Novitzkas warns. “The decisions we make now, about whether intelligence is centralised or personal, will shape the next century of human life. Africa has the chance not just to catch up, but to leap ahead.”

Specno is urging policymakers, innovators, and industry leaders to recognise PSI as humanity’s next great leap forward.

Without intentional design and distributed frameworks, superintelligence risks becoming humanity’s greatest divide instead of its greatest breakthrough.

This represents a 21% increase from the previous year when only 62% of African companies ranked innovation as a top priority. Despite the absence of African firms in the top 50 most innovative companies in 2023, their readiness for innovation is on par with their global counterparts. 

But innovation is often complex and expensive and with strain on budgets it’s hard to imagine how more money can be spent on this. This where corporates can take a leaf out of the startup founders book – lean, agile, rapid prototyping, validation experiments, customer interviews and growth hacking are some of the terms you will hear in the corridors of wherever startup founders find themselves.

Those that succeed with startups often do so with intense constraint, particularly when it comes to deployable capital, available time and staff. These startup founders master the art of doing a lot with little reducing time to take products live and at reduced costs – overal reducing the risk of bringing their digital products to life.

What these corporates have is a loyal customer base, a footprint that can empower innovations and capital to throw at it – the missing ingredient? Venture know-how. And this is where venture building come into play. 

And this innovative approach to building companies is now coming to the corporate environment. PepsiCo Labs has backed and/or built ventures along their entire supply chain and have pioneered more than 100 ventures.

And a key ingredient is to spin out a division that focusses specifically on venture development – allowing for a different culture, a different approach and less corporate red tape.

Back home, Old Mutual has set up a structure for this called Next176 with the vision to create disruptive and innovative new businesses to positively impact one billion lives. Similarly, ShopriteX is the innovation team driving pace setting innovations like Checkers Sixty60. 

But building a host of ventures at the same time requires startup know-how and a whole range of skills. And whilst most of these skills can be hired for, in different stages of ventures one requires different measures of these resources executing. As such a new type of agency has evolved that offers venture services to large corporates.

Venture services are the action of supplying corporate venture-building teams with teams or individuals that can execute specific validation experiments to bring to life the potential of the venture for further development, or gain enough insights to reject it as a venture that will likely fail – all while spending substantially less money than what a full software build and launch would have cost.

“It’s about augmenting the venture building teams of the corporates to give them access to a diverse team that lives and breathes startup and venture building techniques,” says Renier Kriel, head of Corporate Venture Services at Specno. 

“Specno is not your traditional consultancy”, says co-founder and CEO, Daniel Novitzkas. “We’re bringing a startup approach to corporate innovation, leveraging our extensive experience working with entrepreneurial ventures. We’re not here to tell corporates what they want to hear; we’re here to push boundaries and deliver real value. And we do that by accelerating execution and leveraging know-how learned from our engagement with hundreds of startups. We’re shifting our focus to include corporates because we believe in the value we create when building startups through corporate venture building. Corporates have the resources; they just need the right partner to help unlock their innovative potential.”

Where the corporate climate is influenced by constant technological change and economic imbalance, companies cannot afford to stand still. The next frontier of corporate growth lies in harnessing innovation and fully utilising its existing assets, especially its customer base using best-in-class startup methods.

The future belongs to those corporations that can transform their loyal customers into engines of growth through innovation.

Despite this, South Africa remains one of the major markets for global investment, with the African Tech Startups Funding Report released earlier this year highlighting that 633 African tech startups raised an impressive $3.3bn in 2022. Yet, 2022s total capital backing disappoints with no further increase compared to the previous year-on-year results.

Despite discussions around limited investment prospects amid the looming threat of a recession, South African startup founders maintain an optimistic outlook on the country’s socio-economic progress and remain committed to strengthening the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

This sentiment was widely shared at the recent Founders Den (9 March 2023), a community-based networking event coordinated by Cape Town based innovation agency Specno and its partners.

Events like as the Founders Den showcase the increasing influence of venture builders in forming significant social compacts in South Africa.

This is crucial in a nation where depending exclusively on the government to drive innovation is unrealistic, and the responsibility falls on entrepreneurs and early-stage businesses to secure funding for growth and scaling.

“As business owners, our goal should not be to compete against each other to see who can secure the most capital,” says Specno co-founder and CEO, Daniel Novitzkas. “Given that the government’s funding allocation plan is struggling to aid early-stage company growth, it’s crucial that we cheer each other on in raising capital. Doing so can demonstrate to investors the potential of the South African startup collective, which can attract more foreign investment.”

The rapidly advancing startup and venture builder has set itself an ambitious objective to assist one million entrepreneurs in launching and realising their business ideas by 2030.

The startup framework they are developing is being followed by thousands of entrepreneurs already, and over the last four years has led to the creation of over 100 startups – many of whom are venture backed.

Their occasional Founders Den is a unique gathering driven by members of the innovation community, providing a sense of involvement that caters to the specific needs of entrepreneurial enterprise owners.

The invitation-only event offers practical insights from experienced founders and opportunities to connect with potential talent, investors, and partners, shaping the example that is ‘social compacts in action’, and presenting a renewed opportunity to collaborate towards a shared objective.

Last week’s main discussion, led by Notvitzkas and OfferZen’s Philip Joubert, was followed by breakout sessions that encouraged idea-sharing among almost 100 business owners, industry experts, and investors, predominantly from the mobile and web applications sectors.

Key takeaways included learning to pitch to venture capitalists and legacy corporations, and discussing the process of scaling a businesss.

Participants were advised on corporate investment, addressing the ‘founder’s dilemma’, founder’s burnout, and the importance of adopting a global mindset for exploring international opportunities and understanding worldwide startup ecosystems.

“Developing a supportive structure for new and existing entrepreneurs involves creating a networking space where local founders can convene, exchange knowledge and experiences, foster communication about challenges and successes, and openly offer and receive advice on their respective business journeys,” says Novitzkas.

“We want to cultivate a culture where we can appreciate the differences between our local ecosystem and those of international structures, and build a supportive network of founders in South Africa that looks at mutual encouragement and assistance,” adds Specno co-founder and director, Jacques Jordaan.

Specno intends to announce a more frequent founders only meet-up schedule for 2023 and beyond.

The most recent gathering, held on March 9, 2023, was live-streamed and can be watched on their LinkedIn page.

Daniel Novitzkas and Jacques Jordaan built Specno to help businesses achieve these and much more. Their vast experience in innovation, venture building and the entrepreneurial space enabled them direct Specno towards helping technology startups grow seamlessly, build digital products, and drive corporate innovation.

Explaining how they have done these and navigated through challenges successfully, Daniel Novitzkas, also the CEO of Specno, had a Q&A session with TechEconomy.ng

Could you please explain what Specno stands for?

Founded in 2018, Specno helps startups, businesses and large enterprises validate, design and build their app ideas. In 2022, the company was recognized as the top-rated app development and user-experience agencies in South Africa.

As one of only (and leading) venture builders in South Africa, Specno is unique in that we blend startup theory with business models used by UX agencies, development houses, venture capitalists, and accelerator programmes, to ensure that our clients build not only world-class products but highly sustainable and scalable businesses.

The pandemic period is always one to remember. Lots of businesses closed down, while others encountered slow growth. But Specno achieved a consistent annual growth rate of 230% year-on-year. How were you able to pull this off?

We have been studying strong cultures from Silicon Valley, namely Netflix, Google, Amazon and Valve, and have adopted many of their practices for how to build high-performance teams.

What sets us apart is that we acknowledge that we might fail anyway, so let’s risk failure and adopt Silicon Valley’s approach to talent management and transparency, and create a culture of freedom and responsibility where people feel like owners of the business.

With everyone feeling like they were owners, we were able to take advantage of the chaos that COVID-19 brought and I think we captured a lot of market share in this way. We are now under pressure to maintain our culture and growth as we continue to scale.

These days, lots of people are either scared of starting a business or you find others running into one for purposes best known to them. From your expertise in building high-growth startups, what are the approaches that must be put into consideration before saying it’s a go?

Well, starting a business is basically saying go, and just the learning that goes into getting the business to a point of generating revenue counts as starting. For me, education is key, where how quickly people want to build their business is a direct result of how much they are willing to learn, and how much time they are willing to spend executing.

A lot of people want to start a business, but very few people engineer their lives to accomplish their desires. Setting small achievable goals and spending time learning and implementing – those are the ways you start a business. I also believe a lot can be picked up on the go, and I think people can change. Many entrepreneurs who make it through Y Combinator are surprised to find themselves as business owners, they just want to build something that solves a problem, and that’s what business is at its core.

During the process of growing Specno, what were the initial challenges encountered and what are the new challenges that rose after much success?

Specno gets much of its competitive edge by hiring mostly young people, who bring an eagerness, determination and open-mindedness to problem-solving which is vital to understanding and developing world-class solutions to complex challenges.

However, young people inherently lack extensive experience and wisdom, which is needed when trying to scale your company. As Specno has grown – and as our teams have grown to include older and more experienced staff – our biggest challenge has been ensuring that our youthful spirit isn’t lost.

How have you been able to navigate through these challenges?

To maintain a youthful energy, we’ve taken inspiration from the likes of Google and created a flexible and more informal working environment. Staff are allowed to determine their own working hours and locations, we provide free meals, snacks and entertainment, and our offices are littered with scooters and skateboards which team members can use to commute from one part of the office to the other.

In this way, it’s all about removing friction and making the office a space where people are excited to visit. Instead of making it a space where people feel forced to sit for hours, we’re trying to give them everything they need to live a happy and healthy life – one where coming to work is easy and leaves them feeling energized.

What does failure mean to you and how would you help other founders overcome the fear of failure?

Failure is missing your target/goal without learning from the situation. If you view building a business as the ultimate opportunity to learn, then it’s very difficult to “fail” as each instance where you receive a different outcome than the one expected is an opportunity to understand why the outcome was different and make improvements that allow you to be more accurate or successful the next time.

I would also say that failure is an inability to remove your ego from what needs to be done. Entrepreneurship is an internal battle, and if we can’t overcome our own insecurities, our own need for control, or the need to be right, then it’s very difficult to build a successful business. You need to be comfortable trusting others and trusting the process.