**3. The physical research setting; gauteng province in context**

**Figure 1** shows the current official boundary of South Africa and its nine provinces. The focus for this paper is Gauteng Province located towards the northeastern side of South Africa. According to [10], it is the smallest province—covering only about 18,200 km2 , that is, about 1.5 per cent of South Africa's land cover. However, almost 25 per cent of the South African population (13.5 million) lives in Gauteng Province. About 75 per cent of this population is Black and 20 per cent is White, whilst the remaining (5 per cent) proportion is shared amongst Asians and Coloureds, with the latter slightly more than the former. Of importance to our

#### **Figure 1.**

*The map of South Africa showing its neighbouring countries and its provinces (map of South Africa with English labels" by Htonl-own work. Licenced under CC BY-SA 3.0 via commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Map\_of\_South\_Africa\_with\_English\_labels.svg#/media/File:Map\_of\_South\_Africa\_with\_English\_labels. svg).*

*A Conceptual Framework for Researching Disruptive Innovation and Innovative Business Models DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.111808*

research is that Gauteng province is not only South Africa's wealthiest province but also Africa's economic hub – contributing about 40 per cent to the country's gross domestic product [11].

Formal education has been on the increase since 1994 and had reached 30 per cent in 2008 and is currently over 40 per cent. Despite the odds, science, engineering and technology are popular subjects in the province [12]. The economic activities of Gauteng Province have all the prerequisites of making it a knowledge-based economy [11, 13, 14]. Similarly, it is proposed in the Gauteng Employment Growth and Development Strategy (GEGDS) 2009–2014 that innovation should be one of the drivers of employment through small and medium entrepreneurship [15, 16]. This is possible because Gauteng spends about half of the national budget on research and development in the country [11]. One key intervention in the innovation space is the Gauteng Science Park Incubation Programme detailed in [16].
