In the African context, Frank Rizzo, technology sector leader for KPMG in South Africa, believes that mobile is still the top technology to drive business transformation, followed by data analytics and then cloud.

“With our upcoming Africa survey to be released at the end of 2013, we will be able to tell if the rest of Africa is in agreement with my sentiments,” said Rizzo.

KPMG surveyed tech leaders on a number of topics, including which factors are most important to fostering innovation.

More than three-fourths of them said that the availability of talent is the most important factor enabling technology innovation, followed by access to technology infrastructure (69%), ability to drive customer adoption (68%), and access to capital (66%).

But not all countries cited talent as the top factor. Innovation incentives were among the top two most important factors in India (tied for first with infrastructure), Israel (tied for first with talent) and China (second most important).

Yet, when asked how accessible innovation incentives at the respondent’s company are, 82% of those in large enterprise and mid-market companies in India said they were accessible, 64% in Israel, and 60% in China.

Rizzo expects that African executives would most likely rate innovation incentives as the foremost driver for fostering innovation. Read more