27 Jan So you want to be on the Innovation City stage?

Every so often, someone reaches out to ask how our event curation works and can they put their name forward as a potential speaker.

They’d been following Innovation City for a while. They’ve attended an event or two. They’ve built something interesting, or formed a strong point of view, or spent enough time in the work to feel they have something worth contributing. And the question, in one form or another, is always the same: How do I get involved?

The honest answer is that there isn’t a single route onto an Innovation City stage, and that’s by design.

Our events aren’t built around speaker slots. They’re built around community. A community filled with people who are paying attention: founders, operators, investors and creators. People who don’t come to be impressed, but to leave with something sharper than when they arrived. That expectation shapes everything about how we curate.

Which is why we’re careful.

Not careful in a gatekeeping sense, and certainly not precious, but intentional. We’re less interested in perfect narratives and more interested in lived experience. Less interested in rehearsed certainty and more interested in people who’ve had to make real decisions, sit with real trade-offs, and learn in public.

That’s also why some of the voices that have resonated most strongly on our stages weren’t the loudest or most visible when we first encountered them. They were people doing the work, thinking deeply about it, and able to articulate what they’d learned without turning it into a pitch.

Two of our premier events illustrate this approach particularly clearly.

Digital Mastery is where the marketing, digital, and tech ecosystem gathers to make sense of what’s actually shifting; not in theory, but in practice. Attention, AI, platforms, performance: these are not abstract topics for this audience. They’re daily constraints. The people who are invited onto that stage are there because they’ve wrestled with those constraints themselves. It’s why senior leaders and teams from companies like Google, LinkedIn, Samsung, ShopriteX and leading agencies continue to show up, not for inspiration, but for clarity.

Later in the year, Digital Divas creates a very different kind of space. It’s not about trends or tactics, but about growth, visibility, leadership, and progression for women working in and around tech. What makes it work isn’t polish; it’s specificity. The stories land because they’re grounded in real moments; decisions made, trade-offs faced, confidence built (or tested) over time. The room responds when speakers speak from experience, not about it.

And then there’s everything that happens in between! While our larger, premium events anchor the Innovation City calendar, the real heartbeat of the community sits in the weekly sessions that happen around them.

These are the conversations that don’t need a big stage to matter.

Our masterclasses are practical and focused. They’re designed for people who want to understand how something actually works, not just why it matters. Topics tend to be specific and grounded; from AI tools and digital strategy to platform shifts, customer insight, and go-to-market decisions. The audiences are usually mixed: founders, corporates, operators, marketers, creators and product teams who are close enough to the work to ask better questions, and who value clarity over performance.

Founder stories are exactly what they sound like, and intentionally nothing more. These sessions centre on South Africans building companies in real conditions; sharing what they’ve tried, what surprised them, what didn’t work, and what they’d do differently if they were starting again. They’re not pitches and they’re not highlight reels. The value comes from context: where the founder was at the time, what constraints they were under, and how decisions were made when the outcome wasn’t obvious.

Our panel discussions and fireside chats are curated with the same discipline as our larger stages, but in a more intimate setting. Conversations work best when the people having them have genuinely different perspectives and enough experience to disagree usefully. These sessions are often shaped around a specific question or tension; something the ecosystem is actively grappling with, rather than a theme that’s too broad to be meaningful.

Across all of these weekly formats, the principle is simple. If the room is giving up an hour of their time, the conversation needs to be worth it. That’s why we look for speakers and contributors who are close to the work, clear about what they know, and honest about what they’re still figuring out.

Not every session is meant for everyone. But every session is designed to be relevant to someone who’s building, leading, or deciding inside the digital and tech ecosystem.

We curate for relevance, not reach. For contribution, not credentials alone. For people who respect the room as much as the room respects them.

That’s why we’re opening a quiet call-out.

If you’re working in tech or digital, or building something where the story is still unfolding, and you’ve spent enough time in the work to know what you’d share differently now, we’d like to know who you are. Submitting your details doesn’t put you on a shortlist, and it doesn’t promise a microphone. It simply helps us see the ecosystem more clearly as we shape future conversations.

Some of those conversations will happen on stage. Some won’t.

Either way, they start the same way: by paying attention to the people doing the work.

Interested? Fill in this form here.