The South African Breweries (SAB) Foundation recently announced the winners of its inaugural Innovation Awards at a ceremony in Sandton held on 31 October 2011.
Tito Mbatha, a GIBS Entrepreneurship MBA alumnus, was awarded the runner-up prize for his company The Invoice Exchange.
It is a great honour for a GIBS Entrepreneurship MBA student to place second in this competition which was open to all South African citizens. The Invoice Exchange was chosen out of 198 innovations that were submitted. The contestants went through three panels of judges, both internal (SAB) and external, and Mbatha was presented with his award by SAB Foundation chairman Mr Cyril Ramaphosa.
“I think this is a true testament to the GIBS Entrepreneurship MBA,” says Mbatha who received an investment of R500 000 in the competition for his idea.
The Invoice Exchange is a web-based company supporting and enabling small and medium sized enterprises who supply blue-chip companies, to access working capital immediately by selling their invoices on an exchange and receiving payment within 24 hours rather than the standard “30-days plus” invoice. This will allow SMEs to provide more goods and services and employ additional people. The SAB Foundation will invest in IT systems and the cost involved in taking the system to market.
The competition was open to all South African citizens and was established with the objective to recognise unique product inventions which work to improve the lives of women, youth, persons with disabilities and persons in rural areas. This is part of the SAB Foundation’s primary focus which is to ignite a culture of entrepreneurship in South Africa as a source of economic growth, job creation and innovation.
The winner of the inaugural SAB Foundation Innovation Awards 2011 is Reel Gardening, owned by 25-year-old Claire Reid, whose community gardening product, Garden in a Box, received an investment of R1 million. The other runner-up was ShonaQuip, led by Shona McDonald, which designs and manufactures innovative wheelchairs and seating support for disabled people in under-resourced areas.
The GIBS Entrepreneurship MBA programme provides students with the opportunity to build and develop the disciplinary business skills that one would typically learn on an MBA but, over and above that, students are required to integrate and apply these skills in an entrepreneurial setting which will put each graduate on the fast-track to fulfilling their entrepreneurial ambitions. For more information on this programme, please click here.