Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and an expert on how technology impacts the developing world, recently spoke with Nii Simmonds whose blog Nubian Cheetah I read regularly. The topic of their discussion was how innovation can thrive even where constraints are quite significant—as they often are in Africa. He offered seven rules about how innovation in the developing world happens, and I found that they ring quite true, particularly #2. Note: Comments/examples in parentheses are from Nii.
1. Innovation (often) comes from constraint (If you’ve got very few resources, you’re forced to be very creative in using and reusing them.)
2. Don’t fight culture (If people cook by stirring their stews, they’re not going to use a solar oven, no matter what you do to market it. Make them a better stove instead.)
3. Embrace market mechanisms (Giving stuff away rarely works as well as selling it.)
4. Innovate on existing platforms (We’ve got bicycles and mobile phones in Africa, plus lots of metal to weld. Innovate using that stuff, rather than bringing in completely new tech.)
5. Problems are not always obvious from afar (You really have to live for a while in a society where no one has currency larger than a $1 bill to understand the importance of money via mobile phones.)
6. What you have matters more than what you lack (If you’ve got a bicycle, consider what you can build based on that, rather than worrying about not having a car, a truck, a metal shop.)
7. Infrastructure can beget infrastructure (By building mobile phone infrastructure, we may be building power infrastructure for Africa - see my writings on incremental infrastructure.)
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