Leapfrogging technology

An example pertains to countries which move directly from having no telephones to having cell phones, skipping the stage of copper wire landline telephones altogether. Another example, obtained from Wikipedia entry, pertains to the use of ethanol fuel for powering automobiles in Brazil, replacing gasoline, which is the de-facto fuel. Also, as opposed to the […]

An example pertains to countries which move directly from having no telephones to having cell phones, skipping the stage of copper wire landline telephones altogether. Another example, obtained from Wikipedia entry, pertains to the use of ethanol fuel for powering automobiles in Brazil, replacing gasoline, which is the de-facto fuel. Also, as opposed to the conventional power generation method, the city of Rzhao in China uses solar energy exclusively to heat water, and most of the lighting and traffic signals are powered with the so-called photovoltaic solar power. Thus, to quote the Wikipedia entry, “the adoption of solar energy technologies in developing countries are examples of where countries do not repeat the mistakes of highly industrialized countries in creating an energy infrastructure based on fossil fuels, but “jump” directly into the Solar Age.” In this article, I will expatiate on the telephony example, exploring other recent examples and trends, discussing the implication, and suggesting the scenario down the road.
I remember in 1985 in Kabba, my ancestral hometown, my mom used to be called “Mama Oni Phone,” a Yoruba dialect that translates into “The Woman with a Phone.” Her phone was a landline, and only the King and a handful of people in Kabba town could boast of a phone in “those days.” This is because, for technical, infrastructural, economic, and management-related reasons, Nigeria could not deploy the technology required to provide a phone in every household in Kabba, in particular, and Nigeria in general. Then, boom, thanks to American innovation, twenty or so years later, in Kabba, the norm became a situation whereby most people owned phones. Today, in Kabba, I doubt if there is a single, able-bodied person who does not have a phone. However, the phone of today is different from that of yesterdecades: mobile, wireless, handsets, instead of copper-wired landline phones. So, even though Nigeria did not succeed in deploying wired landline phones on a massive scale, there is no problem getting a handset into the hands of almost all able-bodied Nigerians. This is really a perfect example of leapfrogging technology.
In terms of the innovative products that are considerably simplifying our lives today, the world obviously needs to give gratitude mostly to the U.S. for funding virtually all the innovative, long-duration, projects that make those products and making them available for public, non-military use via the so-called dual-use classification of the projects. Such products include cell phones, smartphones, satellite and global positioning systems (GPS); main-frame, mini-scale, micro-scale, and high-performance computer technologies; night vision glasses, drones, rockets and access-to-space devices, the Internet, and so on.
President Obama alluded to leapfrogging technology by African countries when he met with fifty or so African heads of state in Washington D.C. a couple of weeks ago. Obama sounded enthusiastic at the prospect of Africans being able to leapfrog technologies and running away with them. I will say not-so-fast, since I feel we need to take a more cautious approach. So, the question is: do countries that leapfrog technologies lose anything in the process? By skipping inferior, less efficient, more expensive, or more polluting experimental technologies and industries, and moving directly to more advanced solutions, countries do miss out on the growth that comes from failure. The consequences could actually be serious. Although this caution may not apply much to cell phones, there are many areas of technology where the growing pains are quite important and constitute an integral part of technological development. As an example, I will briefly mention Chinese aerospace later in this article. Suffice to say that, down the road, individual countries need to boost their own development efforts.
Besides telecommunication, as alluded to above, Nigeria has made quite some progress in banking, where information and communications technology (ICT) has found prominent applications. However, there are some apparent contradictions: with all the sophisticated banking processes taking place inside the building of a typical Nigerian bank, you have, on the outside wall of the bank building, folks openly urinating! That is one thing that leapfrogging does – normal development is evolutionary and a normal progression would have taken care of open urination and open defecation, way before the deployment of ICT and other high technologies.
I am happy that Nigeria can use sophisticated ICT in the banking sector, my statements on open urination/defecation notwithstanding. The good thing about this example is that open urination/defecation can be stopped, relatively easily, with better education and the provision of public sanitary facilities. This will normally be a government’s prerogative.
You are probably aware of the struggles that China is going through in developing its commercial aerospace programs. Some are even suggesting that the country is combing through all nooks and corners, by any means possible, to obtain data that could help it accelerate the leapfrogging process in aerospace. Unfortunately, as of today, the country still does not seem to have a commercial-scale airliner that is wholly developed in China. That is, whereas China has been able to leverage on prior developments by highly-developed countries like the U.S., Germany, and the U.K. in other areas, the aerospace industry is highly complex, and China does not seem to have any friends in the developed nations that can help it accelerate the country’s aerospace portfolio. The developed world seems to be telling China to “go through the grind,” as they have done. It’s difficult to leapfrog on this one!
The take-away from this article is that leapfrogging technologies has both advantages and disadvantages. Highly proprietary technologies cannot be legally leap-frogged.