A six-member team from the University of Cape Town (UCT) has beaten hundreds of entries and 18 finalists for the top prize in a US competition aimed at stimulating the development of innovative concepts into positive real-world-impact businesses.

The creation of a low-cost fire-detection device for informal housing secured the UCT team the Global Social Venture Competition’s (GSVC’s) People's Choice Award as one of the top five initiatives worldwide.

The GSVC is a social business plan competition providing aspiring entrepreneurs with mentoring, exposure and prize money to commercialise the business idea.

The Khusela project was developed on the back of an honours thesis published at the end of 2012 by Khusela cofounder and strategy director and UCT Graduate School of Business (GSB) inclusive innovation masters student Francois Petousis.

Petousis, along with his team members – Khusela cofounder and head of technological development and UCT electrical engineering lecturer Samuel Ginsberg, Khusela finance and operations director David Gluckman, Khusela project management and community engagement director Emily Vining, Khusela product design and manufacture director Max Basler and Khusela strategic technical development director Paul Mesarcik – planned to fully develop, test and roll out about 2 000 devices in a pilot project within four or five informal settlements in the City of Cape Town in October, using funding secured from the Technology Innovation Agency and UCT.

“We received excellent feedback from the judges, specifically because our numbers were reasonable and justified, we have significant scalability and a strong plan to do so [and] the social impact scales as the business does, so there is a significant market which we have great opportunity to serve and the value created is significant,” Gluckman said in a statement.

Petousis noted that the number of shack fires in South Africa averaged about ten a day, with fatalities recorded every other day.

“Our proactive early-warning system networks individuals within communities and the authorities to mitigate the loss of life and property caused by shack fires – a global human tragedy,” he said, pointing out that there were over one-billion shack- and slum-dwellers worldwide – a number that was set to rise to 1.4-billion by 2020.

The Khusela team entered the international competition through the UCT Student Social Venture Programme, which was created to improve the quality and performance of African universities at global social business plan competitions and hosted by the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the UCT GSB Net Impact Chapter.

“Social innovation is increasingly gaining focus not only in business, but at business schools. Especially in our emerging market situation, we need to encourage innovative thinking and the generation of new ideas to meet the unique challenges of our environments,” UCT GSB director Professor Walter Baets said.

The Bertha Centre is the Southern African regional outreach partner for GSVC, which is held every year at the University of California, in Berkeley, US, and hosts the initial round of the competition.