At Cornastone, innovation and thinking out-of-the-box, is a way of life. We recognise the importance of innovation in maintaining a competitive edge. Our innovation programme also directly contributes to the development of South Africa’s knowledge economy.

According to a recent World Bank report, “The emergence of the global knowledge economy has put a premium on learning throughout the world. Ideas and know-how as sources of economic growth and development, along with the application of new technologies, have important implications for how people learn and apply knowledge throughout their lives.”

These are the principles that guide our actions in all we do, both internally and externally. Our team has since 2016. been holding regular Think Tank initiatives where external speakers have the opportunity to showcase their areas of expertise, stimulate critical thinking and be a catalyst for further action amongst the team.

Two Cornastone representatives recently returned from the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona and the first Think Tank for 2017 was inspired by some of the key learnings taken from MWC 2017.

The mobile industry was incidentally the first industry to adopt the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, under the theme “connecting all to a better future”.

 

One of the underlying passions shared by many of the committed Cornastone staff is the pursuit of new technology to solve social problems.

To this end, the development and possibilities of 5G technology was a highlight of the discussion.

In a world where heterogeneous networks work in synergy to provide high speed, low latency always on connectivity, the connected individual becomes a reality. This is effectively 5G technology in action.

 

5G will require a multitude of disparate network elements working together to provide high-speed data networks. It is impossible for existing solutions to support this type of network.

In a future world, machine learning and self-healing networks are essential to make 5G networks function.

Cornastone’s strategic focus on IoT platforms, APIs, big data, analytics, process robotics, smart city/tech, customer experience, and cloud is headed in the right direction and is leading us to what is called the 4th industrial revolution.

This is just the start of an ongoing discussion and the creation of thought leadership around how Cornastone can harness new technology to improve business processes for our clients and simultaneously contribute to social development solutions on an international platform.