Africa's Role in the Global Space Economy with Davis Cook

Meet Davis Cook, the CEO of RIIS (Research Institute For Innovation and Sustainability), the largest innovation advisory firm in Africa. With his extensive experience in strategy, innovation, and development, Davis has become a key figure in shaping Africa's burgeoning space economy.

Based in Kenya, he not only leads RIIS and its East Africa activities but also contributes significantly to the Anza group, including Anza Capital, a venture capital fund, and the South African Innovation Summit, a major startup event. His past roles as Chairperson for ZASpace and recognition as a Karman Fellow and an M&G 200 Young South African Leader underline his influential presence in the space sector.

In this episode, Davis Cook delves into Africa's dynamic role in the global space economy. He discusses the continent's strategic approach to space, moving beyond traditional roles to unlock new possibilities. Davis provides a comprehensive view of Africa’s efforts in building local space capabilities, the implications of these developments for global technology and how they tackle Earth-centric challenges. He shares insights from his diverse professional journey, spanning strategy consulting, public sector roles, startups, and corporate experiences across multiple continents, and how his work at RIIS is crucial in developing major innovation ecosystems in sectors like mining, energy, and space across Africa.

You'll discover:

• Davis's journey from physics to leading in the space industry.
• The evolving space economy's potential for new opportunities.
• The impact of emerging space nations on the global stage.
• Opportunities beyond engineering: law, design, filmmaking in space.
• The importance of networking within the space community.

Quote:

"Space is no longer the final frontier but the next frontier. It’s an area ripe for exploration, not just geographically, but for professional and personal growth."

- Davis Cook

Episode Links:

Connect with Davis on LinkedIn

Research Institute For Innovation and Sustainability

Follow RIIS on LinkedIn

Follow Inter Astra on LinkedIn

Credits:

Production by CxS Partners LTD

Executive Producer: Toby Goodman

Audio & Sound Design: Lee Turner

Artwork: Ryan Field

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Davis Cook :

One of the big misconceptions that we see is people say, 'Space is about putting people in space, and Africa has these other problems'.

Well, the reality is that the best way to solve these other problems, in many cases, is through the use of space technologies.

Hi. I'm Davis Cook, and you are listening to Your Business in Space. I am the CEO at the Research Institute For Innovation and Sustainability. That means I spend a lot of time working with governments to think about how best to develop their space sector around Africa. I currently live in Nairobi, Kenya. Before this, I lived in Johannesburg and in London, and really grew up in South Africa, although I was also born in Spain.

And so I've spent a lot of time, all over the world. When I originally was kind of, like, growing up as a young kid, my dream was to be ambidextrous. And although that didn't quite work out the way that I'd planned, I did go into a career in science and business. I was always fascinated about trying to understand why the world is the way that it is and understanding how we get to where we are. And you can answer that question through science or through philosophy or through economics. And so I ended up going all down these different paths and living in different parts of the world, all so that I could learn more and sort of satisfy that curiosity. I was at high school in Pretoria, at Pretoria Boys High, which is incidentally the same high school that Elon Musk went to, although he was many years before me, so we never crossed paths. And I then continued, at university, the University of Pretoria, where I originally registered to study microbiology.

I was really fascinated at the time by how bodies worked, and that seemed appropriate. And on the 1st day of university, I ran into a school friend who was incredibly excited by his own choice to study physics. And he was far more excited than my peers who were studying microbiology, and I actually changed on that day to study physics and applied math, which surprised my parents no end when they when I came home and they asked how was microbiology. And I said, I didn't go. I started something else, but I've never looked back. So it was a bit of a spur of the moment decision, although I'd always loved science, but one that has been really something I've been really happy about. We were quite lucky in a university that it was, you know, we had the opportunity to explore a lot of different subjects and and topics. So even though I was I was studying kind of physics and applied math as a as a second major, I ended up doing a lot of additional work in economics.

I audited English language classes. And so I ended up getting quite a broad exposure to, like, a lot of different topics that I think was in a South African context really quite unique. The other thing that I was really grateful for is there were a couple of professors who were really not that interested in the details around maybe the mathematics of of what we were doing, but were much more interested in getting us to understand the principles and understanding the concepts about why things worked. And so, you know, I think that led to this very critical attitude of always trying to understand why something is happening before you start figuring out the minutia of what it is. And I think that that kind of attitude has always been, yeah, I think has been great for helping me understand other aspects. And it was also really inspiring to have professors who, who took a much broader view than just wanting you to repeat information parrot fashion, but wanted you to really understand the real mechanics and depth of the topic, which was really great. I then realized that, as much as I loved science, I did not want to work in a scientific field. I found it a little bit too lonely.

And after a bit of a gap year that I I spent in UK for about 4 years where I did spa work and the like, and I ended up working in a bookstore for a number of years, I came back to South Africa where I set up part of the team that set up the quantitative analysis division at KPMG. So sort of this was management consulting, working with the banks, and applying a lot of the maths and physics that I had studied in building out credit risk models and a lot of the of technical work around banking. And so I'd moved away into kind of more of a business environment, and then I spent a long time jumping from one area to the next. So from there, I tried to start up a renewable energy company in South Africa that after a year had taken all of my hard earned savings. And then I decided to go into the complete opposite direction, which is as low risk as possible, which is that I worked for the South African government. So, I was a civil servant for a few years, which I found was a good risk counterpoint to working in the startup environment. And then from there, I moved back to the UK and, worked in consulting, worked for a big mining company. I attempted a second startup in fast moving consumer goods, which also failed.

And all of a sudden, I saw that there was this opportunity for me to bring a business and economic angle into the space sector that wasn't that I didn't really see at the times. And so one of the big, I guess, challenges, and this is one of the things that we're trying to resolve as company, is that many space activities or kind of national space programs have traditionally been led by engineers and scientists. And, you know, there is a very good reason for that. You cannot build a space industry without the engineering and science that gets us into space. But I think what's happened over the last 10 years is that it's moved away from being a very, public sector and government led, environment, which is more scientifically oriented into something in which the private sector is playing a much larger role. And, you know, that's the whole idea of new space. And when you start thinking of the space industry as any other advanced manufacturing value chain, the same as automotive or shipbuilding or, you know, like, you know, aerospace, it's important to bring in, like, what we believe is it's important to bring in an industrial economics view towards the SpaceX or the space value chain. It's important to understand that when you're building a manufacturing cluster in a particular region, there are economic development and socioeconomic development consequences to that.

But many agencies don't have that expertise in house. And so this is really the work that we've been doing is trying to bring in an industrial economics, economic development, socioeconomic development perspective on what it means to build a space sector. And primarily, you know, because we operate in Africa, this has been working with all of these really exciting emerging space nations that we see coming up, you know, across the whole whole continent. So it was really through those conversations that we had with South African National Space Agency that I realized there was this big gap in the strategic thinking that we're seeing amongst a lot of agencies. And just for me personally, you know, I had I deviated from the engineering or scientific track into space, you know, when I'd left university. And this was just an amazing opportunity for me to curve back to work in an area that I really still loved just personally, And, you know, hopefully add some, some value to that. I don't think we have a clue what the future for space holds. And that for me is really exciting, right? We're in this transition period, this kind of operating environment for space being traditionally the domain of these really big primes and small number constellations.

And we're now moving to a world in which there are, you know, tens and even hundreds of thousands of platforms up there and lunar stations and, and all these kind of things. And the best way that I can describe this is there were many bad and many good things that emerged from the expansion of Europe into other regions of the world. And, you know, without getting into a discussion around the issues of colonialism and colonization, which are very, very real, that expansion into a new geography completely changed everything. Like it, it shifted the, the, the social fabric in Europe, in the countries that they arrived in. It opened up new technologies, new diseases, new foods, like everything about society changed as we moved into these new geographies. And space is a geography. Like we forget that it's a place that people go to. And as we open up this new geography, there are gonna be all sorts of things that we hadn't even imagined today coming out of us.

So, my first point is that, like, I don't think we have a clue what the space economy of 2,035 is gonna look like. And what that means is that no one has won that future economic race. Right? We're all still at the ground floor. Like, yes, there are people who are further ahead, but Amazon didn't win the dotcom bubble. It was only afterwards that it started kind of growing, right? It's these first movers have to sort of go through this, this, this complex challenge. And I think that we are in the process of going through that right now. And I think what what that kind of suggests is that all of these emerging space nations around the world, and in a sense that even includes the older nations who are building up these very emergent new space capabilities, we all have an equal opportunity to compete in that environment, as well as to collaborate and kind of like bold new sets of relations, new institutions, new structures, and so on. So when it comes to question of like, where are there opportunities for for collaboration, I think that there is this kind of like general idea that there's these these two global poles, and that is that is maybe true in the extremes, but there is an entire world that sits in the middle who need to maintain excellent relations on all sides.

During the Cold War period, this would have been an online movement. Right? There are people who, you know, necessarily in countries that necessarily have to maintain relationships with many, many different players. And I think that there is a significant opportunity to strengthen those kinds of relationships. And I think the more that that countries are empowered to negotiate effectively, the better negotiating partners they become in the long term. And so I think that, like, working to develop these capabilities is really important, improve the understanding around like what space means and, like, the value for it, I think, ultimately benefits anyone. And sort of like, you know, the global community. I think in terms of like specific areas of opportunity, I think that there is, of course, my focus is entirely on Africa. And so I I can't speak for other kind of emerging kind of regions.

But, you know, one of the things that we see here is there's a huge appetite for people to get involved in the space industry. And not just in terms of engineering, but there's the application side. There is, last year, a school team from Zimbabwe won the international legal kind of debate championship, the focus of which was space. And the topic was, like, an insurance event in space. Like, there's this team of Zimbabwean, like, youth lawyers who are arguing with it. So, I'm like getting excited by being in space. So it's, there's always opportunities. And I think that working with local partners, whether that's through direct partnerships, whether it's agency to agency, whether it's through development agencies providing sort of specific funding to sort of build these programs, I think that driving education and empowering capabilities makes for more effective partners down the line.

And I think that that for me is one of the big kind of messages that we're trying to push about why this is important for people outside of Africa to realize for Africa. One of the really valuable opportunities provided by space based platforms is to do certain things better than the way that we do them today. So whether it's the use of high resolution imagery or remote sensing data and kind of, you know, like what Starlink is doing as an example, but providing access to internet in remote regions, I think that there are far more efficient and cost effective ways of doing things that we are already doing that is enabled by space. Agencies that are and most of the space agencies across Africa are doing exactly that. They're finding ways in which they can use this new technology platform to enhance the work that is already being done. This is very different from, you know, trying to create an entire new space program and launch capabilities and so on. And, you know, there is a place for that, but, but one of the big misconceptions that we see is people say, space is about putting people in space, and Africa has these other problems. Well, the reality is that the best way to solve these other problems, in many cases, is through the use of space technologies.

And so building out an industry that is able to utilize, you know, appropriate sense of platforms, that is able to put together the right ground infrastructure for, telecommunications. These things solve real problems far more efficiently. And so the question is not, should you have or should you not have? The question for me is around where is the best place to use these kind of technologies to solve existing problems far more effectively? And that really is, you know, a lot of the conversation that is ongoing and not just outside of Africa, even in country, there are very regularly, you'll have to have conversations with government departments or, ministers or other people to explain why this is so, so valuable. But once they get it, they're like, oh, we can do the same thing for 10% of the cost. Like, that's an easy bit of calculus to go through. And the fact that it happens to be space is, in one sense, is a little bit immaterial about, like, where this technology is physically resides, as long as you're getting an outcome that contributes towards citizen needs. There are many different pathways into space, Not all of them are engineering. So, if you're a lawyer, if you're an artist, if you're a filmmaker, if you're a fashion designer, you know, someone has to design spacesuits.

Someone has to think about the legal consequences of launching. Someone has to think about the graphic design of what your user interfaces are. Right? So, there are many pathways to operate in the space world that are not you know, purely through engineering things. So, I think this is an important encouragement for many people. The second is that I can almost guarantee that in whichever country you are, there are already groups of enthusiastic people who are excited about space. One of the most important groups is the Space Generation Advisory Council, and there are chapters in certainly many countries across Africa, but around the world. And the SDAC does really great work in promoting use development in space. See if there is a local space agency.

They very often have outreach programs and support the STEM education in general. And I think the other thing that I've seen like an amazing amount of traction on as well is just reaching out to people on platforms like LinkedIn. There's a remarkable amount of goodwill, I think, amongst people in the space sector to get more people into space. I think everyone that works in space to an extent is proud of what they do, and like rightly so. Like, I'm thrilled that I get to, like, talk about space and, like, have space conversations every day. And if I can encourage someone to do that, 15 minutes of my time to help shape someone's future is incredibly valuable. That experience is one that I've seen mirrored in many other people in the industry. And so don't be shy of reaching out.

They'd be surprised how eager people are to, to pay it forward. I think that, and maybe this is more early to mid stage career professional than necessarily a young person, but being able to do things like manage projects is a really useful skill set in the space sector. I think another critical thing that we don't have nearly enough skills are is around science communication. Space is complicated, and if you're able to help people communicate complex problems in simple ways, that is something that the space sector could really kind of benefit and value from. You know, how do you help people tell a good story? And you don't need to develop that skill in space. If you can spin a yarn, you know, you really help sort of help organizations go, go forward. Of course, things like enthusiasm, is difficult, but to get excited by, by working in, in the sector and just being an evangelist for it. I work with colleagues now who come out of backgrounds as varied as economics, politics, or sociology, all of whom are working in, in space.

And so I think, you know, the ability to think critically through a problem, listen to advice, I think those are generally useful skill sets. Maybe the communication and storytelling is the one that we're missing the most. Right now, I am working in Kenya for the next several years to help build out the East African space Technology Ecosystem. It's really important for me to do this because I think East Africa is an amazing part of the world. It is ideally located for space operations, and it's an incredibly vibrant, active area. And so with this emerging kind of space economy around here, it's really the place that we feel and that I feel we can make the most difference and contribute the most into supporting the rest of the region to grow. Ideally, what we wanna see 3, 5, 7 years from now is a really vibrant space ecosystem in the region and all sorts of exciting businesses in the space sector coming up from from Kenya and the surrounding countries.

I'm Davis Cook. You've been listening to Your Business in Space.

All the ways to connect with me are in links in the show notes.

And to discover more, head across to interastra.space