Among other things

Just heard an outstanding interview with Ethan Zuckerman. - WNYC - The Brian Lehrer Show: Bridging the Digital Gap (November 25, 2009). A feast for thought - apropos of Thanksgiving and more credence to the notion that innovation is not about what you provide, but what people do once you provide it.

Forget leaving the laptop in the office and taking your smartphone. In Africa and India - and soon in much of the world - entrepreneurs don't bother with cumbersome offices and brick-like "smart" phones. Computers?! - hah! If it can't fit in one hand and be operated with less than 10 buttons - don't bother opening a store there. As Ethan Zuckerman pointed out in his interview with Brian Lehrer, an advertisement (a sign), a mobile phone, and a toolbox is all you need to make money in Africa and along the Indian Coast. The simple and cheap mobile phone - not the computer - is the most important technological innovation to reach developing nations. Check out the blog and listen to the interview.

I agree with Zuckerman and believe that he is picking up on a discussion that has been surfacing over the past couple of years. For much of the world the mobile is the technological sweet-spot - culturally, environmentally, and economically. To my mind it marks a significant divide in the dynamic of technological adoption and application. The next phase is reinvention and then completely distinct innovation. We are already seeing the first glimpses of what's going to happen in tech-markets. Products and services will succeed only if they are developed for regions if not micro-regions - contrary to the slogan, if global operators think globally, they will fail. In the meanwhile, competitors in small markets will continue to thrive particularly in more diverse markets with greater numbers of entrepreneurs, who make on average less money. That is not the West... last week over dinner in Singapore someone who's opinion I really respect leaned over to me and said "We are ...[the past-tense of one of the 7 words you cannot say on T.V.]". If by "we" this person meant the countries with oversized, overfed, and over indulged populations - its true.

If it works in Abu-dhabi, then my bet is that it won't in Akra. If it sells in New York, don't market it in New Delhi. And if Bangalore wants it, figure out how Beijing will want to change it or don't bother. My plan? Work global / think local - and make sure that your sweet-spot is bigger than your market.

Links:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/2009/11/25/segments/144997
http://africaknows.com/
http://globalvoicesonline.org/
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/

Ice Cream Cone Image Credit: D Sharon Pruitt

Yep... it's a blob.



"It was cleaning my carpet and all of the sudden it started to groan and inflate - then it ate whiskers!"

This is an abstract for my talk at next week's symposium in Singapore - http://www.designthinking.sg/

The world is wicked indeed! - This is a play on the phrase attributed to Horst Rittel to describe the kind of problems that are of such great complexity that they require an interdependent set of participants to address and that these solutions may often lead to new problems.

We do, after all, live in an era with incredibly complex problems. Amongst those problems that have been identified there is an ever-shrinking number of solutions that we can claim. Moreover, fewer and fewer solutions seem to fulfill the needs and ideals of everyone - and yet we still have communities. Groups of these individuals may disagree on any number of topics but they find common ground with just one. This affinity crystallizes their relationship, allowing them to make productive decisions and to realize the real potential of difference. If we can teach people to appreciate this point, then they will become practitioners that see the community within their project as well as the communities that exist outside of it. That is to say – we can tame the wicked.

As an assistant professor in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design I teach students to begin by addressing the design question rather than its solution. Through their work in project-based courses and in discourse-based pedagogy students learn to identify communities as heterogeneous groups rather than as stagnant and isolated blocs. In this talk I will present some of the work from these courses as a way of describing how this approach can be effectively used as a method to aid a wide variety of communities from large multinational corporations to small isolated urban centers.