Innovation: where West can learn from the rest

For most of my life, the flow of development and innovation has been largely one way – from West to East. But this is no longer the case. We are moving to a world of multipolar innovation, where it is entirely possible that a solution to US infrastructure problems comes from India or Nigeria.

This has been on my mind a lot recently. On February 28, I’ll be at the Innovation 2019 conference in London. This is supported by EY (and others) and organised in cooperation with the UK civil service. With attendees coming from around the world, it seeks to look at and inspire innovation across government.

In the last decade and a half, we have seen the global innovation map redrawn. Up until the 2000s, innovation largely took place in the West and a few developed Asian countries like South Korea and Japan, and then trickled down to everywhere else. You might have seen occasional smart use cases elsewhere (such as the Philippines’ widespread adoption of SMS), but the future was very clearly being made in a few well-defined areas.

This is manifestly no longer true. By 2009, if you wanted to see what the future looked like, Shanghai would have been as good a place to visit as Silicon Valley. Now, I could point you to dozens of cities in Asia and India, and also suggest places in Africa like Kigali and Nairobi. The point is that innovation is taking place almost everywhere.

There are several drivers for this. Perhaps the biggest is that a lack of infrastructure is not the handicap it once was. Countries that had little in the way of networks are now in a position to leapfrog the west.

A good example of this is how many African countries have gone straight to mobile. This means Africa is a leader in areas like mobile financial services. Indeed, according to the mobile body, GSMA, over half the mobile financial service providers in the world are now located in sub-Saharan Africa – and Nairobi hosts innovation conferences. This has been a huge boost for everyone from governments to local entrepreneurs. A virtuous circle has been created and mobile means Africa is currently seeing rapid increases in internet penetration. The levels of connectivity that took the West 20 years to achieve will probably take Africa five.

Mobile growth in Africa has been driven by individuals and telcos. But you see something that is far more top-down in the Middle East and China. Here, entire cities are being built from scratch. One example is Masdar in the UAE, which is designed to be a hub for clean technologies. Another is Meixi Lake Park in Hunan province, China.

Speaking to Phaidon Press’s newsletter, James von Klempter, the lead architect of Meixi Lake, said: “We can introduce integrated urban innovation. We can combine water transport with localised energy production, cluster neighbourhood centres, advanced flood prevention and water management, and urban agriculture. Meixi is an experiment in future city planning and building. It’s a kind of live test case.”

Meixi Lake and Masdar both have considerable advantages. It is a great deal easier to build a smart city from scratch than it is to retrofit an existing city – and there will be the opportunity to implement many new technologies. Moreover, it seems likely to me that if the current generation of cities from scratch are being built in Asia, the next generation will be built in Africa.

In the West, projects of this scale and speed are unlikely to happen. But that doesn’t mean western countries won’t benefit. In recent years, the US has become known for its crumbling infrastructure. Old and under-maintained highways, schools and bridges (many of which date from America’s boom years) are starting to fall apart. I believe that the lessons and techniques learned from building entire cities from the ground up are likely to be applicable to infrastructure the world over.

It’s also possible that the innovative boost that comes out of the developing world will be greater than even the most optimistic projections. People often say that one of the biggest reasons for Silicon Valley’s primacy in tech is that it has the world’s single largest homogeneous market on its doorstep (this is also given as a reason why Europe has never developed an equivalent). But India and China are vastly bigger. Both have a population considerably larger than all the countries in North and South America combined. Looking a little further ahead, by 2050 Nigeria is likely to have more people than the US.

Of course, government has a huge role to play in all this. It needs to create an environment that is conducive to innovation and a regulatory framework that ensures tech works for all and benefits are widely shared (which is not something western governments have always managed to do). It should encourage local entrepreneurship. And it needs to work across national boundaries with other governments, multinationals and international organisations.

I’m optimistic that these countries will find ways to deliver this innovation dividend and that it will benefit not only their citizens, but everyone regardless of where they live in the world. People often talk about what the next big technological revolution will be. But perhaps they’re asking the wrong question. It may not be so much a case of what – but of where. And the “where” will be places like India and Africa, as they catch up with (and even surpass) the West.