“Marrying the ‘System of Innovation’ and micro enterprises in real world rural SADC”: an overview of collaborative SMME incubation in the Rural Living Lab of Sekhukhune

Abstract

This paper is part of a series dealing with the “Expansion of European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) to Africa - Opportunities, Synergies, Benefits and Limitations”. It provides an overview of the Sekhukhune Rural Living Lab and explores specifically the collaborative business incubation aspects of this Living Lab. It highlights some of the business incubation challenges with regards to the “marriage” between ‘Systems of Innovation’ and the (SMME) inhabitants of “natural daily life /work environments”. It is also an effort at raising the interest of other actors in this arena to collaborate in this endeavour and to collectively find ways of ensuring a more inclusive, real world (and real people) approach to rural development