Follow the latest ideas and policy releases from The Innovation Party Lab at www.tiisetsomaloma.co.za/IfIWasPresident and join the conversation on social media using the hashtag #IfIWasPresident.
The Innovation Party Lab is a fictional policy and systems-design platform by Tiisetso Maloma, author, innovation theorist, and IP entrepreneur, focused on generating practical ideas for how Africa and other emerging markets can build, govern, and strengthen their nations in an increasingly complex and unpredictable world.
It is not a political party in the traditional sense. It does not contest elections or represent a single ideology.
Instead, it exists as a policy engine for emerging economies—a space where governance ideas are designed, stress-tested conceptually, and released publicly for adoption, adaptation, or critique by governments, political parties, institutions, and civil society.
The Lab is inspired by the books of South African author and innovation educator Tiisetso Maloma, including Quick Innovation MBA, Innovate Like Elon Musk, Future of Township Economies, and 90 Days to Create and Launch. His body of work is grounded in applied innovation, execution under constraint, township and emerging-market economic systems, and practical frameworks for turning ideas into action.
Across his work, a central idea emerges:
The future does not belong to those who wait for change, but to those who understand how to create it.
Innovation is presented not as abstract theory or isolated genius, but as a process that can be understood, deconstructed, and actively participated in.
Through frameworks such as the Adjacent Possible and the Human Greed Pyramid, his work teaches how to break down technologies, identify emerging opportunities, and generate innovation pathways aligned with context, capability, and constraint. These tools enable clearer thinking about products, systems, and economic shifts, allowing individuals to make better decisions about where to focus time, energy, and effort.
The aim is empowerment: to help people think independently, recognise where value is forming, and deliberately pursue pathways that expand capability, relevance, and future potential.
This body of work emerges from more than a decade of researching, writing about, and teaching innovation across a wide range of audiences—from primary school learners to postgraduate students. Over that time, a recurring problem became clear: innovation is often either mystified, oversimplified, or reduced to a buzzword.
It is frequently portrayed either as the domain of exceptional geniuses or as a simple linear process of “having a great idea.” Neither framing is accurate, nor useful for understanding how innovation actually works in real systems.
What is missing is a coherent first-principles framework—a way to understand how innovation evolves from what already exists, how it interacts with human behaviour, and how it operates within physical, economic, and social constraints.
The Innovation Party Lab builds on this gap by synthesising these ideas into a systems-level approach to governance and development.
At its core, the Lab uses systems thinking, innovation methodology, and antifragile economics to explore a central question:
How do we build nations in Africa and other emerging markets that are truly robust—capable of surviving shocks, adapting to uncertainty, and improving under pressure?
It rejects fragile, imported, or overly linear development models that fail in complex environments. Instead, it focuses on robust-dynamic ideas—principles that strengthen societies through decentralisation, feedback loops, optionality, and controlled experimentation.
Key conceptual influences include:
- Antifragility and stress-based growth systems
- Decentralised governance suited to complex economies
- Ergodic and non-ergodic thinking in economic design
- Optionality as a tool for national resilience
- Via negativa (removing systemic fragility rather than adding complexity)
The output of the Lab is the Robust Manifesto Nation—a collection of applied policy prototypes rather than ideological positions. These are not theories, but structured ideas designed for real-world conditions in emerging markets.
In practice, the Lab publishes short, high-density policy proposals under the series:
#IfIWasPresident — Innovation Policy Notes
Each proposal is designed to be simple, transferable, and implementation-oriented—ideas that can be adopted or adapted by leaders seeking practical reform.
The guiding belief is simple:
Emerging markets do not fail from lack of ideas. They fail from fragile systems.
The Innovation Party Lab exists to help design stronger systems in public—systems that can be understood, tested, and improved over time.
Its foundation is ultimately a belief in agency:
The future does not belong to those who wait for change, but to those who understand how to create it.
About Tiisetso Maloma
Tiisetso Maloma is an Innovation Speaker & Theorist, author, IP entrepreneur, and award-winning publisher whose work focuses on innovation systems, emerging markets, township economies, and the future of value creation. He is the creator of Ubuntu Stoicism, a philosophical framework that integrates African humanism with systems thinking, and pioneered the diary chronicle book genre.
Maloma has authored over ten books, including Quick Innovation MBA, Future of Township Economies, Innovate the Next, Forget the Business Plan, Innovate Like Elon Musk, and Introducing Ubuntu Stoicism.