Africa's Chance to Leapfrog the West

Last Thursday, Amy and I, along with a few other CMU students, were given the opportunity to have lunch with the World Bank President. Mr. Robert Zoellick. While my initial impression of the World Bank was just that, it is a bank that loans money to various countries, we also learned that the World Bank engages in disseminating innovative knowledge sharing. And surprisingly, not all of this innovative knowledge is transferred from the developed nations to the developing. In fact, certain countries have taken already developed platforms in the West, and had a field day customizing it to their needs. While Mr. Zoellick was primarily talking about projects like M-Pesa, I came across an article in the Harvard Business Review, called "Africa's Chance to Leapfrog the West", that took this concept to a whole new level.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/02/africas_leapfrogging_opportuni.html

Briefly, the article points out that in places like Africa that lack legacy infrastructure, "there is an opportunity for a genuinely transformative, future-friendly reconceptualization of the very notion of infrastructure".
The author discusses the concept of Leapfrogging, a hypothesis (based on Joseph Schumpeter's notion of ‘gales of creative destruction’) which proposes that companies holding monopolies based on incumbent technologies have less incentive to innovate than potential rivals, and therefore they eventually lose their technological leadership role when new radical technological innovations are adopted by new firms which are ready to take the risks [Wikipedia "Leapfrogging"], with respect to technologies like cloud computing, social media, etc. These have resulted in an increased opportunity for Africans, as well as the notion of achieving more with less when compared to their Western counterparts.

However, as with all new technologies, it is not as simple as it seems. Leapfrogging is just the means, and not the end. So, it is up to the entrepreneurs and innovators to use these set of tools and techniques within the constraints of the country's culture, social norms, etc., and transform Africa with "one entrepreneurial triumph after another".

~ Ketaki