leapfrogging

The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa
by Calestous Juma
Published 27 May 2017

Exponential growth in science, technology, and engineering is expanding the range of technical knowledge that the continent can marshal for agricultural transformation. x Foreword to the Second Edition This edition highlights the importance of leapfrogging in agricultural biotechnology. This includes the use of new genetic technologies that do not involve moving genes across species. The same leapfrogging strategies can be applied in other fields such as information and communications technologies, satellite technology, unmanned aerial vehicles, renewable energy, synthetic biology, and polymer chemistry. Judicious use of technologies from these fields can help Africa adopt more ecologically sound agricultural practices.

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HD9017.A2J86 2015 338.1’6096—dc23 2015003225 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper In memory of Christopher Freeman, father of the field of science policy and innovation studies CONTENTS FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  INTRODUCTION  1 The Growing Economy  IX XI XVII 1 2 Advances in Science, Technology, and Engineering  39 3 Leapfrogging in Genetic Technologies  61 4 Agricultural Innovation Systems  83 5 Enabling Infrastructure  117 6 Human Capacity  146 7 Entrepreneurship  183 8 Governing Innovation  218 viii Contents 9 Plowing Ahead  253 NOTES  INDEX  267 301 FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION The publication of the first edition of The New Harvest was written as a manifesto for the optimist.

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Entrepreneurs are best suited to carry out new combinations and disrupt the status quo, and credit-providing institutions should absorb the risk of providing funding to entrepreneurs. These ideas are particularly salient for emerging countries where agriculture accounts for a large percentage of the economy. Schumpeter was interested in how latecomer countries can catch up. The real benefit of catch-up and leapfrogging lies in path creation, and no sector better embodies the promise of technological leapfrogging than agriculture. As a sector, agriculture is inherently entrepreneurial. In fact, over the centuries farmers have proven that they are entrepreneurs who are often forced to respond creatively to changes in their conditions. They are most successful when certain foundations of economic transformation are in place.

Innovation and Its Enemies
by Calestous Juma
Published 20 Mar 2017

This is not a deterministic view of society but an observation of the growth in the global ecology of knowledge and the feasibility of new technical combinations that are elicited by social consciousness. The developing world has the potential to access more scientific and technical knowledge than the more advanced countries had in their early stages of industrialization. The pace at which latecomer economies such as China have been able to leapfrog in certain technologies underscores the possibilities.6 There are growing concerns over the implications of these developments for employment. Self-driving cars will restructure transportation through new ownership patterns, insurance arrangements, and business models. Computer-aided diagnosis, robotic surgery, and myriad medical devices are already changing the role of doctors and how medical care is provided.7 Artificial intelligence and computer algorithms are influencing the way basic decisions are made.

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“The overall collection of technologies bootstraps itself upward from the few to the many and from the simple to the complex. We can say that technology creates itself out of itself.” W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (New York: Free Press, 2009), 21. 6. Dezhi Chen and Richard Li-Hua, “Modes of Technological Leapfrogging: Five Case Studies from China,” Journal of Engineering and Technology Management 28, nos. 1–2 (2011): 93–108. 7. See, for example, Eric J. Topol, The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care (New York: Basic Books, 2013). 8. Nicholas G. Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (New York: Norton, 2014), 232. 9.

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For a review of the role of innovation in sustainability, see Jochen Markard, Rob Raven, and Bernhard Truffer, “Sustainability Transitions: An Emerging Field of Research and Its Prospects,” Research Policy 41, no. 6 (2012): 955–967; Staffan Jacobsson and Anna Bergek, “Innovation System Analyses and Sustainability Transitions: Contributions and Suggestions for Research,” Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 1, no. 1 (2011): 41–57; Adrian Smith, Jan-Peter Voß, and John Grin, “Innovation Studies and Sustainability Transitions: The Allure of the Multi-level Perspective and Its Challenges,” Research Policy 39, no. 4 (2010): 435–448; and Xiaolan Fu and Jing Zhang, “Technology Transfer, Indigenous Innovation and Leapfrogging in Green Technology: The Solar-PV Industry in China and India,” Journal of Chinese Economic and Business Studies 9, no. 4 (2011): 329–347. 69. The same dynamics apply to the process of scientific discoveries: Simon S. Duncan, “The Isolation of Scientific Discovery: Indifference and Resistance to a New Idea,” Science Studies 4, no. 2 (1974): 109–134. 70.

Lessons From Private Equity Any Company Can Use
by Orit Gadiesh and Hugh MacArthur
Published 14 Aug 2008

One of the key initiatives was a complete redesign of Sealy’s core Posturepedic mattress line. Critically, Sealy shifted away from a costly, two-sided design that allowed mattress owners to do something most didn’t bother to: flip their mattresses. Instead, Sealy designed a new and improved “no flip” mattress whose technology improved Sealy’s margins and leapfrogged the technology of its chief rival, Simmons, which had been selling a one-sided mattress for years. Three other major initiatives that sprang from Sealy’s fullpotential assessment involved account planning strategies and tools, pricing, and manufacturing changes to reduce material yield loss. This rigorous assessment also revealed what Sealy should not do.

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What are customers demanding and competitors doing that will affect the future pricing environment? Are my costs truly competitive? How can we conduct an apples-to-apples cost comparison versus key competition to understand how much and where we are advantaged or disadvantaged? What can we do to close any gaps? What can we do to leapfrog competitors? Will regulations or technology change in some fashion that will impact the business? How and how much? Do we understand where and how we really make money? Do we have unprofitable products? Do we make money on all of our customers? All of these questions are hard to answer. For many of them, you can find hard data (customers and costs, some parts of derived demand) if you know where to look and know how to put it together to define a future environment for the company.

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed
by Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos
Published 1 Jan 1994

So we bit the bullet and just took the heat. This was similar to a political problem faced twenty years earlier by President Eisenhower, who was unable to reveal the U-2 overflights of Russia to answer the charge of a so-called missile gap made against him in the 1960 election campaign. Leapfrogging technology was the name of the Skunk Works’ game, and that occasionally created political problems for both the administration and Congress. That amazing Skunk Works organization was unique in the world in its ability for stretching far beyond that which was thought to be feasible and enjoying a success rate unprecedented for advanced technology projects.

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Now, in the post–cold war era, we are likely going to be involved in a variety of future conflicts in which overflights for intelligence purposes and for military operations will be of enormous importance. That access is going to have to be surreptitious and undetectable, and clearly the Skunk Works will be continually called upon to keep leapfrogging technology in behalf of the national security. But how we will be able to maintain the tremendously high standards of the Skunk Works during a new era of downsizing defense and intelligence appropriations is really outside my realm of expertise. What is clear is the nation’s need to keep this kind of unique operation intact and thriving far into the foreseeable future.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch
by Lewis Dartnell
Published 15 Apr 2014

There are a number of encouraging cases of this kind of technological leapfrogging in the developing nations in Africa and Asia today. For example, many remote communities unconnected to power grids are receiving solar-power infrastructure, hopping over centuries of the Western progression dependent on fossil fuels. Villagers living in mud huts in many rural parts of Africa are leapfrogging straight to mobile phone communications, bypassing intermediate technologies such as semaphore towers, telegraphs, or land-line telephones. But perhaps the most impressive feat of leapfrogging in history was achieved by Japan in the nineteenth century. During the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan isolated itself for two centuries from the rest of the world, forbidding its citizens to leave or foreigners to enter, and permitting only minimal trade with a select few nations.

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Wells’s 1895 novel The Time Machine; and S. M. Stirling’s Island in the Sea of Time (1998), about an entire modern community transported back to the Bronze Age. wheelbarrow: Lewis (1994). leapfrogging: Davison (2000), Economist (2006), Economist (2008a, b), McDermott (2010). Japan leapfrogging: Mason (1997). intermediate or appropriate technology: Rybczynski (1980), Carr (1985). repurposing: Edgerton (2007b). 1: THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT Bruce D. Clayton, Life After Doomsday: A Survivalist Guide to Nuclear War and Other Major Disasters. Aton Edwards, Preparedness Now! An Emergency Survival Guide.

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September 21. http://www.economist.com/node/7944359. ———. 2008a. “Of Internet Cafés and Power Cuts: Emerging economies are better at adopting new technologies than at putting them into widespread use.” February 7. http://www.economist.com/node/10640716. ———. 2008b. “The Limits of Leapfrogging: The spread of new technologies often depends on the availability of older ones.” February 7. http://www.economist.com/node/10650775. ———. 2012. “Doomsdays: Predicting the End of the World.” December 20. economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-chart-11. Edgerton, David. 2007a. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900.

CIOs at Work
by Ed Yourdon
Published 19 Jul 2011

When you think of the scale of a country like India and the problems it has to solve with 1.1 billion people, or China, with 1.3 billion people, the approach and the underlying technical architecture is fundamentally different than when you’re designing solutions for 310 million people. Yourdon: Right. Kundra: We’re very interested in looking at some other leapfrog technologies, whether it’s in South Africa or in India or in China, in terms of how are they are leapfrogging; what does mobile commerce look like; and as I mentioned, the three megatrends in social, mobile, and cloud, and how they will fundamentally alter development and commerce. Yourdon: Some guy just found one of his spare PCs in the garage and used that and $500 from his credit card to get it started.

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Index A AdKnow ledge, Inc., 87 Agile development methodology, 62 Amazon, 314, 319 America COMPETES Act, 304 American Airlines, 47, 72 American Defense Department, 84 American Marketing Society, 113 American Production Inventory Control Society, 211 Ames, 320 AMR Corp, 47 Android, 43 Annapolis, 340 Apple, 97, 101, 217, 242, 295 Computer, 35 Genius Bar, 8 Archipelago Holdings Inc., 87 Arizona Public Service (APS) Company, 66, 211, 223 Arizona State University, 227 ARPANET, 19, 117, 135 Art of Computer Programming, 2 Atlanta-based Southern Company, 191 AT&T, 191, 249 B Ballmer, Steve, 39 Bank of Boston, 47 Baylor-Grapevine Board of Trustees, 47 Bedrock foundation, 249 Bell Atlantic Mobile, 231 Bell Labs, 2, 249 BlackBerry, 60, 96, 116, 121, 171, 184, 246, 261, 296, 317 Blalock, Becky, 182, 191, 215 adaptability, 192 Air Force brat, 191, 192 Atlanta-based Southern Company, 191 banking industry, 203 Boucher, Marie, 196 brainstorm, 202 24/7 business, 199 business intelligence, 204 cloud computing, 205 cognitive surplus, 206 cognitive time, 206 Coker, Dave, 196 communication and education, 200 Community and Economic Development, 194 consumer market, 202 cybersecurity, 207, 209 data analytics, 204, 205 disaster recovery, 209 distributed generation, 204 distribution organization, 201 Egypt revolution, 198 farming technology, 206 finance backgrounds/marketing, 200, 209 Franklin, Alan, 193 Georgia Power, 191 Georgia Power Management Council, 193 global society, 206 Google, 198 incredible technology, 195 Industrial Age, 206 Information Age, 206 InformationWeek's, 196 infrastructure, 202 intellectual property, 196 intelligence and redundancy, 207 Internet, 198, 206 leapfrog innovations, 205 mainframe system, 207 marketing and customer service, 193, 200 MBA, finance, 192 microfiche, 207 microwave tower, 207 mobile devices, 203 mobility and business analytics, 205 Moore's Law, 205 new generation digital natives, 197 flexible and adaptable, 199 innovation and creativity, 199 superficial fashion, 198 Olympic sponsor, 193 out pushing technology, 202 reinforcement, 201 sense of integrity, 200 Southern Company, 194, 198, 201, 207 teamwork survey, 201 technology lab, 202 undergraduate degree, marketing, 192 virtualization, 205 VRU, 203 Ward, Eileen, 196 wire business, 201 world-class customer service, 203 Bohlen, Ken, 211 American Production Inventory Control Society, 211 Apple, 217 APS, 211, 223 ASU, 227 benchmarking company, 216 chief innovation officer, 229 Citrix, 217 cloud computing, 218, 219 cognitive surplus, 220 DECnet, 212 Department of Defense, 222 distributed computing, 217 energy industry, 214 gizmo/whiz-bang show, 216 GoodLink, 217 hard-line manufacturing, 218 home computing, 219 home entertainment, 219 Honeywell, 219 HR generalists, 215 information technology department, 211 Intel machines, 217 John Deere, 213 just say yes program, 223 Lean Six Sigma improvement process, 211 Linux, 220 MBA program, 214 mentors, 213 national alerts, 224 North American universities, 228 paradigm shifts, 218, 220 PDP minicomputers, 212 Peopleware, 226 prefigurative culture, 221 R&D companies, 218 Rhode Island, 226 role models, 213 San Diego Fire Department, 224 security/privacy issues, 217 skip levels, 223 smart home concepts, 219 smartphone, 217 social media, 225 Stead, Jerry, 214 Stevie Award, 211 Storefront engineering, 212 traditional management, 219, 226 Twitter, 224 vocabulary, 221 Waterloo operations, 213 Web 2.0 companies, 227 Web infrastructure, 215 wikipedia, 220 Y2K, 222 Botnets, 23 Brian's and Rob Pike's, 2 Bristol-Myers Squibb, 33 Broadband networks, 241 Brown, 227 Bryant, 227 BT Global Services, 253 BT Innovate & Design (BTI&D), 253 Bumblebee tuna, 130 C Career writing technology, 67 CASE tools, 232 Cash, Jim, 50 Christensen, Clyde, 212 Chrome, 14, 18 Chrysler Corporation, 175 Citibank, 337 Citicorp, 313 Citrix, 217 Client-server-type applications, 59 Cloud computing, 218, 219, 239, 240, 261, 262, 310, 311, 313 Cloud technology, 62 CNN, 54 COBOL, 250 Cognitive surplus, 20, 79, 206, 291 College of Engineering, University of Miami, 113 Columbia University, 1 Community and Economic Development, 194 Computer Sciences Corporation, 35 Computerworld magazine, 196 Consumer-oriented technology, 22 Content management system, 133 Corporate information management (CIM) program, 309 Corporate Management Information Systems, 87 Corvus disk drive, 36 Customer Advisory Boards of Oracle, 191 Customer-relationship management (CRM), 56 Cutter Business Technology Council, 173 D Dallas Children's Medical Center Development Board, 48 DARPA, 19 DDoS attacks and security, 81 DECnet, 212 Dell Platinum Council, 113 DeMarco, Tom, 16, 226 Department of Defense, 222, 329, 332 Detroit Energy, 252 Digital books, 30 Digital Equipment, 48 Distributed computing, 217 Dodge, 189 Dogfooding, 11, 37, 38, 236 DTE Energy, 173 DuPont Dow Elastomers, 151 E Educational Testing Service (ETS), 151 E-government, 282, 285 Electrical distribution grid, 182 Elementary and Secondary Education Strategic Business Unit, 151 Elements of Programming Style, 2 Ellyn, Lynne, 173 advanced technology software planning, 175 Amazon, 184 artificial intelligence group, 175 Association for Women in Computing, 173 benchmark, 180, 181 BlackBerries, 184 Burns, Ursula, 175 Chrysler, 176 Cisco, 186 cloud computing, 183, 184 component-based architecture, 186 corporate communications customer service, 185 Crain's Detroit Business, 173 cyber security threats, 177 degree of competence, 187 diversity and sophistication, 182 DTE Energy, 173 energy trading, 176 engineering and science programs, 188 enterprise business systems policy, 186 executive MBA program, 176 Facebook, 185 fresh-out-of-the-university, 187 General Electric, 174 Google, 184 Grace Hopper, 174 grid re-automation, 182 Henry Ford Hospital, 174 internal social media, 185 International Coaching Federation, 178 iPads, 184 IP electrical grids, 182 iPod applications, 182 IT budgets, 186 IT responsibilities, 176 Java, 186 level of sophistication, 179 lobbying efforts, 181 medical computing, 175 Miller, Joan, 174 Mulcahey, Anne, 175 Netscape, 175 neuroscience leadership, 189 object-oriented programming, 186 Oracle, 186 peer-level people, 179 people system, 177 policies and strategies, 180 Radio Shack, 180 remote access capacity, 189 security tool and patch, 183 sense of community, 180 Shipley, Jim, 174 smart grid, 177, 182 smart meters, 182 smart phone applications, 183 swarming, 179 technical competence, 178, 179 Thomas, Marlo, 174 Twitter, 185 UNITE, 181 vendor community, 186 virtualization, 183, 184 Xerox, 175 E-mail, 9 Employee-relationship management (ERM), 56 Encyclopedia, 115 Encyclopedia Britannica, 292 ERP, 123 F Facebook, 244 Ellyn, Lynne, 185 Sridhara, Mittu, 73, 84 Temares, Lewis, 116, 121, 131 Wakeman, Dan, 169 Federal information technology investments, 299 Flex, 236 Ford, 102 Ford, Monte, 47 agile computing, 59 agile development, 62, 66 airplanes, 51 American Airlines, 47 Arizona Public Services, 66 Bank of Boston, 47 Baylor-Grapevine Board of Trustees, 47 BlackBerry, 60 board of Chubb, 51 board of Tandy, 51 business organizations, 63 business school, dean, 50 career writing technology, 67 client-server-type applications, 59 cloud technology, 62 CNN, 54 common-sense functionality, 49 consumer-based technology, 60 CRM, 56 Dallas Children's Medical Center Development Board, 48 Digital Equipment, 48 ERM, 56 financial expert, 69 frequent-flier program, 57 frontal lobotomy, 57 Harvard Business Review, 50 HR policies, 65 IBM, 48 information technology, 47, 52 Internet, 54 Internet-based protocol, 59 iPhone, 52 IT stuff, 58 Knight Ridder, 51 legacy apps, 59 mainframe-like applications, 59 management training program, 64 marketing and technical jobs, 48 Maynard, Massachusetts mill, 48 MBA program, 50 mentors, 49 Microsoft, 50 mobile computing, 62 New York Times, 53 operations center, 54 PDP-5, 49 PDP-6, 49 Radio Shack, 51 revenue management, 57 role models, 49 security paradigms, 62 self-service machine, 57 Silicon Valley companies, 68 smartphones, 54 social networking, 51, 53, 56, 58 stateful applications, 59 techie department, 48 The Associates First Capital Corporation, 47 transmission and distribution companies, 47 wireless network, 59 YouTube, 65 Fort Worth, 226 Free software foundation, 19 Fried, Benjamin, 1, 241 agile development, 25 agile methodologies, 26 Apple Genius Bar, 8 ARPANET, 19 Art of Computer Programming, 2 Bell Labs, 2 books and records, accuracy, 25 botnets, 23 Brian's and Rob Pike's, 2 cash-like principles, 29 CFO, 4 check writers, 18 chrome, 14, 18 classic computer science text, 1 cognitive surplus, 20 Columbia University, 1 compensation management, 7 competitive advantage, 9, 18 computer science degree, 1 computer scientists, 6 consumer-driven computing, 12 consumer-driven software-as-a-service offerings, 12 consumer-driven technology, 12 consumer-oriented technology, 14, 22 corporate leadership, 25 cost centers, 4 DARPA, 19 decision makers, 17 decision making, 13 360-degree performance management, 7 detroit energy, 30 digital books, 30 document workbench, 2 dogfooding, 11 e-books, 29 Elements of Programming Style, 2 e-mail, 9 end-user support, 7 engineering executive group, 4 European vendors, 6 file servers and print servers, 17 Folger Library editions, 30 free software foundation, 19 German company, 13 German engineering, 13 Gmail, 15 Godot, 26 Google, 1 books, 29 products, 5, 10 software engineers, 6 hiring managers, 6 HR processes and technologies, 6 IBM model, 13 instant messaging, 9 Internet age, 6 interviewers, training, 6 iPad, 29 iPhone, 29 IPO, 3 IT, engineering and computer science parts, 4 Knuth's books, 2 Linux machine, 8 Linux software, 19 machine running Windows, 8 Macintosh, 8 Mac OS, 9 macro factors, 11 Managing Director, 1 mentors, 1 microcomputers, 18 Microsoft, 5 Minds for Sale, 20 Morgan Stanley, 1–3, 5, 16 nonacademic UNIX license, 2 nontechnical skills, 5 oil exploration office, 17 open-source phone operating system, 20 outlook, 15 PARC, 19 performance review cycles, 7 personal computer equipment, 15 post-Sarbanes-Oxley world, 25 project manager, 13 quants, 24 rapid-release cycle, 26 R&D cycle, 24 regression testing, 27 role models, 1 shrink-wrapped software, 14 signature-based anti-virus, 22 smartphone, 20, 27 social contract, 8 society trails technology, 21 software engineering tool, 13 software installation, 14 supply chain and inventory and asset management, 10 SVP, 4 telephony, 17 ten things, 13 TMRC, 19 TROFF, 2 typesetter workbench, 2 UI designer, 14 university computing center, 28 videoconferencing, 12 Visicalc, 24 Wall Street, 23 Walmart, 6 waterfall approach, 25 XYZ widget company, 5 YouTube video, 20 G Gates, Bill, 39, 50 General Electric, 134 General Foods, 309, 326–328 General Motors, 33, 321, 329, 332 George Mason School of Information Technology, 309 Georgia Power Company, 191–193, 196 Georgia Power Management Council, 193 German company, 13 German engineering, 13 German manufacturing company, 232 Gizmo/whiz-bang show, 216 Gmail, 15 GoodLink, 217 Google, 1, 84, 85, 117, 217, 219, 220, 222, 235, 241, 263, 302, 319 apps, 314 books, 29 commercial products, 10 model, 293 Government Accountability Office (GAO), 305 4G program, 250 4G smartphone, 235 GTE, 231 Gupta, Ashish aspiration, organization, 256 bandwidth and network infrastructure, 267 BlackBerry, 261 business and customer outcomes, 274 capital investment forums, 269 career progression, 255 cloud-based shared infrastructure model, 263 cloud computing, 261, 262 collaboration, 272 communications infrastructure, 258 compute-utility-based model, 262 control and integrity, 268 core competency, 255 core network infrastructure, 267 core strengths, 256 cost per unit of bandwidth, 267 customer demands, 268 data protection, 261, 262 decision-making bodies, 269 demographics, 272, 273 device convergence, 263 dogfooding, 259 employee flexibility, 260, 264 engagement and governance, 269 enterprise market segment, 261 equipment management, 260 executive MBA, 256 fourth-generation LTE networks, 267 functional service departments, 270 Global Services, distributed organization, 257 Google, 263, 275 Google Apps, 266 handheld devices, 265 hastily formed networks, 258 IMF, 266 innovation and application development, 265 iPad, 257, 260, 261, 266,267 iPhone, 266 Japan, 257, 258 London Business School, 253 management functions, 257 management sales functions, 257 market segments, 259 MBA, General Management, 253 measurements, 271 messaging with voice capability, 264 mini-microcomputer model, 261 mobile communications network, 258 mobile-enabling voice, 259 mobile phone network, 260 mobile traffic explosion, 265 network infrastructures, 265 network IT services, 254 network quality, 257 new generation digital natives, 271 disadvantages, 273 Google, 273 opportunities, 273 Olympics, 263 opportunities, 275 organizational construct, 272 outsourced network IT services, 259 outsourcing, 271 per-use-based model, 262 portfolio and business alignment, 274 Portfolio & Service Design (P&SD), 253 primary marketing thrust, 264 product development thrust, 264 product management team, 259 project and program management, 255 resource balance, 270 scalability, 262 security, 262 Selley, Clive, 254, 255 service delivery organization, 254 single-device model, 264 smart devices, 267 smart phones, 266 telecommunications capability, 259 upward-based apps, 264 virtualization, 261 voice-over-IP connections, 258 Windows platform, 261 Gurnani, Roger, 231 accounting/finance department, 233 analog cellular networks, 250 AT&T, 249 bedrock foundation, 249 Bell Atlantic Mobile, 231 Bell Labs, 249 blogs, 244 broadband networks, 241 business benefits, 237 business device, 240 business executives, 238 business leaders, 248, 249 business relationship management, 248 buzzword, 239 CASE tools, 232 cloud computing, 239, 240 COBOL, 250 consumer and business products, 231 consumer electronics devices, 241 consumer telecom business, 233 customer-engagement channel, 244 customer forums, 244 customer support operations, 251 customer-touching channels, 236 degree of control, 246 distribution channel, 250 dogfooding, 236 ecosystem, 243, 249 enterprise business, 233 ERP systems, 236 face-to-face communications, 244 FiOS product, 235 flex, 236 "follow the sun" model, 239 German manufacturing company, 232 4G program, 250 4G smartphone, 235 hardware/software vendors, 247 information assets, 245 information technology strategy, 231 intellectual property rights, 244 Internet, 235, 239 iPhone, 243 Ivan, 232 Lowell, 232 LTE technology-based smartphone, 235 marketing, 251 MIT, 246 mobile technology, 234 Moore's law, 242 MP3 file, 235 network-based services, 240 Nynex Mobile, 233 P&L responsibility, 251 PDA, 238 personal computing, 235 product development, 234, 251 role models, 232 sales channels, 251 smartphones, 238 state-level regulatory issues, 251 state-of-the-art networks, 243 telecom career, 232 telephone company, Phoenix, 234 Verizon Communication, 231, 232 virtual corporations, 241 Web 2.0, 244 Williams Companies, 232, 233 WillTell, 233 wireless business, 233 H Hackers, 19 Harmon, Jay, 213 Harvard Business Review, 50 Harvard Business School, 331 Heller, Martha, 171 Henry Ford Hospital, 174 Hewlett-Packard piece, 129 Home computing, 219 Honda, 102 Honeywell, 219 Houghton Mifflin, 134, 136 I IBM, 48, 250 manpower, 311 model, 13 Indian IT outsourcing company, 255 Information technology, 52 Intel machines, 217 International Coaching Federation, 178 Internet, 9, 44, 54, 117, 235, 239, 316, 322 Internet-based protocol, 59 Interoperability, 341 iPads, 2, 94, 97, 184, 257, 260, 264, 267, 288, 289, 295, 296 IP electrical grids, 182 iPhones, 43, 52, 96, 101, 170, 181, 260, 264,296 iPod, 101 IT lifecycle management process, 37 Ivan, 232 J John Deere, 213 K Kansas, 226 Kernigan, Brian, 2 Knight Ridder, 51 Knuth, Donald, 2, 29 Kraft Foods Inc, 309 Krist, Nicholas, 28 Kundra, Vivek Clever Commute, 305 cognitive surplus, 303 command and control systems, 301 consumerization, 302 consumption-based model, 300 cyber-warfare, 301 Darwinian pressure, 302 desktop core configuration, 306 digital-borne content, 301 digital oil, 300, 307 digital public square, 304 enterprise software, 303 entrepreneurial startup model, 306 frugal engineering, 306 Google, 302 government business, 302 innovator's dilemma, 307 iPad, 302 IT dashboard, 302 leapfrog technology, 306 massive consumerization, 301 megatrends, 301 parameter security, 302 Patent Office, 305 pharmaceutical industry, 304 phishing attacks, 301 policy and strategic planning, 299 security and privacy, 301 server utilization, 300 social media and technology, 300, 306 storage utilization, 300 Trademark Office, 305 Wikipedia, 303 L LAN, 259 Lean Six Sigma improvement process, 211 Levy, Steven (Hackers), 19 Linux, 220 machine, 8 open-source software, 19 Lister, Tim, 226 London Business School, 73, 253, 256 Long-term evolution (LTE), 235 Lowell, 232 M MacArthur's intelligence officer, 327 Macintosh, 8 Mainframe computers, 118 Mainframe-like applications, 59 Marriott's Great America, 35 McDade, 327 McGraw-Hill Education, 133, 147, 150 Mead, Margaret, 221 Mendel, 311 Microcomputers, 18 Microsoft Corporation, 5, 11, 33, 36, 38, 41, 44, 46, 50, 156, 217, 223, 236, 250, 293 Microsoft Higher Education Advisory Group, 113 Microsoft's operational enterprise risk management, 33 Middlesex University, 189 Miller, Joan Apple products, 295 authority and accuracy, 292 award-winning ICT programs and services, 277 back locked-down information, 289 big-scale text issues, 294 big-time computing, 279 BlackBerry, 296 business management training, 281 business skills, 281 central government, 283 cognitive surplus, 291 community care project, 278 community development programs, 277, 278 computers, constituency office, 294 confidential information, 284 data management, 281 decision making, 286 democratic process, 288 economics degree, 278 e-government, 282, 285 electronic communication, 289 electronic-enabled public voice, 286 electronic information, 288 electronic media, 286 electronic records, 280, 284 electronic services, 294 e-mail, 289, 290, 295 forgiving technology, 296 front-office service, 282, 283 Google, 292 Google's cloud service, 290 Government 2, 287 Health and Social Care, 284 House business, 294 House of Lords, 288 ICT strategy, 289, 290 information management, 278 insurance company, 278 Internet information, 285 iPad, 288, 289, 296 IT data management, 279 management principle, 280 local government, 283 mainframe environment, 289 member-led activity, 287 messages, 289 Microsoft, 293 Microsoft's cloud service, 290 mobile electronic information, 284 mobile technology, 289 national organization, 284 network perimeters, 290 official government information, 285 on-the-job training, 281 organizational planning, 278 Parliamentary ICT, 277 project management, 279 public sector, 282 public transportation, 285 quango-type organizations, 283 representational democracy, 286 security, 290, 291 social care organization, 279 social care services, Essex, 278 social care systems, 284 social networking, 285 sovereignty, 291 sustainability and growth, 293 technical language, 294 technology skills, 281 transactional services, 285 transferability, 291 Web-based services, 285 Wikipedia, 291, 292 X-factor, 286 Minds for Sale, 20 Mitchell & Co, 333 MIT Media Labs, 149 Mobile computing, 62 Mobile technology, 234 Mooney, Mark, 133 artificial intelligence, 134 back-office legacy, 136 balancing standpoint, 145 BBC, 140 Bermuda Triangle, 135 BlackBerry shop, 142 Bureau of National Standards, 136 business model, 140 career spectrum, 144 cloud computing, 148 competitive intelligence and knowledge, 143 Connect, 141 customer-facing and product development, 135 customer-facing product space, 137 customer space and product development, 136 digital products development, 144 digital space and product, 146 educational and reference content, 139 educational products, 141 entrepreneur, 150 General Electric, 134 GradeGuru, 140 handheld devices, 142 hard-core technical standpoint, 146 hardware servers, 142 Houghton Mifflin, 134, 136 HTML, 138 industrial-strength product, 141 intellectual content, 148 Internet, 148 iPad, 138, 139, 142 iPhone, 142, 143 iTunes, 138 Klein, Joel, 147 learning management systems, 137 long-term production system, 141 Marine Corps, 134 McGraw-Hill Education, 133, 147 media development, 144 media space, 138, 142 mobile computing, 139 MOUSE, 150 online technology, 138 open-source capabilities, 142 Oracle quota-management system, 143 people's roles and responsibilities, 137 Phoenix, 149 product development, 149 publishing companies, 142 publishing systems, 137 Reed Elsevier, 133, 136 Salesforce.com, 144, 149 scalability testing, 145 senior business leaders, 146 social network, 148 soft discipline guidelines, 141 solar energy, 149 Strassmann, Paul, 135 technical skill set, 143, 144 testing systems integration, 145 The Shallows, 139 transactional systems, 142 trust and integrity, 145 TTS, QuickPro, and ACL, 144 Vivendi Universal, 134 War and Peace today, 139 Moore's law, 242 Morgan Stanley, 2, 3, 16 N NASA, 309, 333, 334 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), 173 Naval Postgraduate School, 134 Netscape, 175 New Brunswick model, 282 News Corp., 147 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 87, 116, 223, 278 New York Times, 53 North American universities, 228 NSA/CIA software, 134 Nynex Mobile, 233 O Oil exploration office, 17 Open-source phone operating system, 20 Outlook, 15 P Pacer Software, 135 Paradigm shifts, 218, 220 Parks and Recreation Department, 126 PDP minicomputers, 212 Peopleware, 226 Personal computing, 235 Personal digital assistant (PDA), 238 Petri dish, 44 Phoenix, 211 Plauger, Bill, 2 Q Quants, 24 R Radio Shack, 51 Reed Elsevier, 133, 136 Reed, John, 335 Rubinow, Steve, 87 AdKnowledge, Inc., 87 agile development, 110 Agile Manifesto, 110 Archipelago Holdings Inc., 87 attributes, 108 capital market community, 91 cash/actual trading business, 88 channel marketing departments, 92 cloud computing, 97 CNBC, 89 collaborative technology, 95 collective intelligence, 95 communication skills, 102, 106 conference organizations, 99 consumer marketplace, 94 data center, 90 decision making, 105, 108 economy standpoint, 100 e-mail, 100 Fidelity Investments, 105 financial services, 92 IEEE, 101 innovative impression, 94 Internet, 98 iPad, 97 iPod device, 91 labor laws, 110 listening skills, 106 logical progression, 104 Mac, 96 mainframe, 104 management and leadership, 104, 105 market data system, 89 micro-second response time, 89 mobile applications, 94 multidisciplinary approach, 103 multimedia, 97 multi-national projects, 110 multiprocessing options, 99 network operating system, 103 NYSE Euronext, 87 open outside system, 88 parallel programming models, 99 personal satisfaction, 109 PR function, 106 proclaimed workaholic, 109 real estate business, 88 regulatory and security standpoint, 96 Rolodex, 94 Rubin, Howard, 99 server department, 97 software development, 89 sophisticated technology, 101 technology business, 88 technology integration, 91 trading engines, 90 typewriter ribbon, 94 virtualization, 98 Windows 7, 96 younger generation video games, 93 visual interfaces, 93 Rumsfeld, Donald, 222 S San Diego Fire Department, 224 Santa Clara University, 36 SAS programs, 131 Scott, Tony, 10, 33, 236 Android, 43 Apple Computer, 35 architectural flaw, 44 BASIC and Pascal, 35 Bristol-Myers Squibb, 33 Bunch, Rick (role model), 34 business groups, 42 COO, 39 Corporate Vice President, 33 Corvus disk drive, 36 CSC, 35 Defense department, 45 dogfooding, 37, 38 games and arcades, 35 General Motors, 33 IBM's role, 37 information systems management, 36 integrity factor, 40 Internet, 44 iPhone, 43 IT lifecycle management process, 37 leadership capability, 40 leisure studies, 34 macro-architectural threats, 44 Marriott's Great America, 35 math models, 36 Microsoft Corporation, 33, 36, 38, 41, 44, 46 Microsoft's operational enterprise risk management, 33 parks and recreation, 34 Petri dish, 44 playground leader, 42 product groups, 42 quality and business excellence team, 33 Santa Clara University, 36 Senior Vice President, 33 smartphone, 43 social computing, 38 Sun Microsystems, 36 theme park industry, 35 University of Illinois, 34 University of San Francisco, 36 value-added business, 33 Walt Disney Company, 33 Senior Leadership Technology and Product Marketing, 71 Shakespeare, 30 Shirky, Clay, 220 Sierra Ventures, 191 Silicon Valley companies, 68 Silicon Valley software factories, 323 Skype, 118 Smart Grid Advisory Committee, 177 Smartphones, 20, 27, 43, 54, 217, 238 Social care computer electronic record system, 279 Social computing, 38, 320 Social networking, 51, 53, 56, 58 Society trails technology, 21 SPSS programs, 131 Sridhara, Mittu, 71 Amazon, 76 American Airlines, 72 back-end computation and presentation, 80 banking, 77 B2B and B2C, 85 business/product departments, 82 business work context, 74 buzzword, 77 career aspiration, 73 career spans, 73 coders, 72 cognitive surplus, 79 competitive differentiation, 74 computing power, 78 contribution and energy, 85 convergence, 75 CPU cycles, 78 cross-channel digital business, 71 cultural and geographic implementation, 72 customer experience, 84, 85 customer profile, 76 data visualization, 79, 80 DDoS protection, 81 economies of scale, 77 elements of technology, 72 encryption, 82 end customer, 83 entertainment, 75 ERP system, 72 Facebook, 84 finance and accounting, 73 foster innovation and open culture, 81 friends/mentors/role models, 74 FSA, 76 gambling acts, 81 games, 79 gaming machines, 80 GDS, 72 global organization, 71 Google, 75, 84, 85 Group CIO, Ladbrokes PLC, 71 industry-standard technologies, 77 integrity and competence, 83 IT, 74, 82 KickOff app, 71 land-based casinos, 79 live streaming, 78 London Business School, 73 mobile computing, 78 multimedia, 84 new generation, 84 on-the-job training, 73 open-source computing, 79 opportunity, 80, 83 PCA-compliant, 81 personalization, 76 real-time systems, 74 re-evaluation, 81 reliability and availability, 77 security threats, 80 smart mobile device, 75 technology-intense customer, 85 top-line revenue, 74 trader apps, 82 true context, 73 underpinning business process, 76 virtualization, 78 Visa/MasterCard transactions, 78 Web 3.0 business, 76 web-emerging web channel, 76 Wikipedia, 79, 85 Word documents and e-mail, 82 work-life balance, 84 young body with high miles, 72 Zuckerberg, Mark, 73 Stead, Jerry, 214 Storefront engineering, 212 Strassmann, Paul, 228, 309 agile development, 340 Amazon EC2, 314 America information processors, 322 Annapolis, 340 AT&T, 332 backstabbing culture, 339 BlackBerry, 317 block houses, 319 CFO/CEO position, 337 CIM program, 309 Citibank, 337 Citicorp, 313, 339 cloud computing, 310, 311, 313 coding infrastructure, 341 communication infrastructure, 341 corporate information management, 329 Corporate Information Officer, 309 counterintelligence, 320 cyber-operations, 338 Dell server, 314 Department of Defense, 329, 332 Director of Defense Information, 309 employee-owned technology, 316 enterprise architecture, 316 exfiltration, 313 financial organizations, 320 firewalls and antiviruses, 312 General Foods, 309, 326–328 General Motors, 321, 329, 332 George Mason School of Information Technology, 309 Google apps, 314 government-supported activities, 326 Harvard Business School, 331 HR-related issues, 331 IBM manpower, 311 infiltration, 313 Internet, 316, 322 interoperability, 315, 317, 341 Kraft Foods Inc, 309 MacArthur's intelligence officer, 327 Machiavellian view, 327 mash-up, 316 military service, 331 NASA, 309, 333, 334 police department, economics, 312 powerpoint slides, 324 Radio Shack, 319 senior executive position, 334 service-oriented architecture, 316 Silicon Valley software factories, 323 social computing, 320 Strassmann's concentration camp, 318 structured methodologies, 342 U.S.

What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly
Published 14 Jul 2010

Within a few years of one another, three different scientists (Hugo de Vries, Karl Erich Correns, and Erich Tschermak) each independently rediscovered Mendel’s forgotten work, which of course had been there all along. Kroeber claims that if you had prevented those three from rediscovery and waited another year, six scientists, not just three, would had made the then-obvious next step. The technium’s inherent sequence makes leapfrogging ahead very difficult. It would be wonderful if a society that lacks all technology infrastructure could jump to 100 percent clean, lightweight digital technology and simply skip over the heavy, dirty industrial stage. The fact that billions of poor in the developing world have purchased cheap cell phones and bypassed long waits for industrial-age landline telephones has given hope that other technologies could also leapfrog into the future.

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Cell phones don’t cancel landlines. Instead, where cell phones go, copper follows. Cell phones train newly educated customers to need higher-bandwidth internet connections and higher-quality voice connections, which then follow in copper wires. Cell phones and solar panels and other potential leapfrog technologies are not skipping over the industrial age as much as sprinting ahead to accelerate industry’s overdue arrival. To a degree that is invisible to us, new tech sits on a foundation of old tech. Despite the vital layer of electrons that constitutes our modern economy, a huge portion of what goes on each day is fairly industrial in scope: moving atoms, rearranging atoms, mining atoms, burning atoms, refining atoms, stacking atoms.

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Wisely, low-income countries are still rapidly inhaling industrial technologies. Big-budget infrastructure—roads, waterworks, airports, machine factories, electrical systems, power plants—are needed to make the high-tech stuff work. In a report on technological leapfrogging the Economist concluded: “Countries that failed to adopt old technologies are at a disadvantage when it comes to new ones.” Does this mean that if we were to try to colonize an uninhabited Earth-like planet we would be required to recapitulate history and start with sharp sticks, smoke signals, and mud-brick buildings and then work our way through each era?

The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality
by Branko Milanovic
Published 15 Dec 2010

They have to pay little or nothing in order to imitate the technology invented in the rich world. While the developed countries have to invest a lot to make technological breakthroughs and create inventions, it is relatively easy and cheap for poor countries to benefit from these inventions by copying them. They leapfrog technological developments. Nigeria does not need to spend time and effort building land phone lines, nor does it need to invent cell phone technology. It can ignore the old technology and simply imitate Nokia, setting up a cell phone factory itself. Third, and somewhat novel, is a reason that has to do with institutions.

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future
by Levi Tillemann
Published 20 Jan 2015

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com CONTENTS Introduction The Great Race State and Market in the Age of Carbon Rules of the Road Market Failure and the Man on a Horse Billions of Cars Organization of Contents Part I Keeping Pace 1 The New Emperor and Wan Gang’s Eco-Wonderland Leapfrogging Leviathans A Brief History of the Global Automobile Winning the Race 2 California Rules: How One State Began a Global Technology Revolution The Desolation of Smog The Reformation: CARB’s New Doctrine of Principled Extremism Technology Forcing—“Impossible” Standards Competing Goods 3 Japan’s Strategic Capitalism MITI and the Japanese Miracle Japan Outclassed Picking Winners Toyota Nissan Sonno Joi: Kicking Out the Barbarians A “Bulwark” in the East Unbearable Retreat Sayonara, Uncle Sam: Ejecting the Americans, Again Go West MITI’s Strategic Retreat 4 The Audacity of Honda “The Fighting Spirit Is My Nature” The Isle of Man TT Muskie and the “Market Defect” The Race to Clean Trial and Terror Blood in the Water: The Battle of 1976 “Protectionist Trickery”?

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Despite an intense government push to electrify China’s cars, the country’s industrial giants had fallen far short. China was the largest automobile market in the world, but its domestic EVs were a blush-inducing afterthought. China, with its double-digit economic growth rates, its 1.3 billion brains, and its $3.4 trillion in U.S. foreign exchange reserves, had aimed to “leapfrog” into the vanguard of automotive technology and dominate the race to build the electric car of the future. Instead, it struggled to keep pace. Leapfrogging Leviathans Part of the allure of leapfrogging was the difficulty of simply catching up. The complexity of today’s auto industry should not be underestimated.

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Honda was unrepentant. He told them, “If I asked you guys when it would be completed, you’d never tell me. . . . The company would go bankrupt before you’d say that.”21 The team redoubled its efforts and, in the end, Honda succeeded in its gambit to leapfrog Toyota and Nissan—which, along with American companies, were forced to license Honda’s pollution control technology. Honda earned princely sums off these royalties. Yet even then, American companies did not like to admit they were behind the engineering curve. When the young Sakurai was farmed out to Ford to help them implement CVCC in its own engines he remembered how hard it was to be heard within Ford’s research edifice.

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance
by Parag Khanna
Published 11 Jan 2011

Selling the glasses to rich Japanese helps cover the cost of donating them to the poor in Africa—but once the production cost comes down to two dollars a pair, they can be sold even to the poor, meaning the market, rather than charity, will sustain the innovation. James Chen has already sponsored the “Vision for a Nation” program in Rwanda, claiming, “If we succeed, Rwanda will have the best vision in the world—now that’s leapfrogging!” Technological leapfrogging—from no phone to mobile phone, and no power to solar power—used to be a small niche of development strategy; now it is the dominant paradigm to advance social empowerment, job creation, and environmental sustainability at the same time. A study by the consulting firm Deloitte found that a 10 percent increase in mobile phone penetration raises GDP by 1.2 percent.

The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All
by Chris Goodall
Published 6 Jul 2016

This event has the potential to change the dynamics of the power utility-customer relationship forever. They go on to get really excited about Solar Houses. When have you ever seen accountants write like this before? The achievement of the ‘Solar House’ is expected to be a landmark in mankind’s efforts to access energy. The ‘Solar House’ will help India leapfrog technologies in the area of supplying uninterrupted 24x7 energy to its citizens. When the conditions for the ‘Solar House’ are achieved, [it] can override all barriers. KPMG expects 20 per cent of Indian houses to have PV by 2024/25. The authors make the point that once residential batteries have come down in price sufficiently, householders have a clear and unambiguous reason to switch to solar.

The Industries of the Future
by Alec Ross
Published 2 Feb 2016

And the big five countries will benefit from being home to the high-paying jobs and wealth accumulation that go with being out ahead of the 191 other countries around the world. They will produce the Ciscos and Junipers of robotics. Interestingly, less developed countries might be able to leapfrog technologies as they enter the robot landscape. Countries in Africa and Central Asia have been able to go straight to cell phones without building landline telephones, and in the same way they might be able to jump ahead in robotics without having to establish an advanced industrial base. The African Robotics Network (AFRON) offers a good model.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
by Kai-Fu Lee
Published 14 Sep 2018

While creating the Avenue of the Entrepreneurs, Guo caught the entrepreneurial bug himself, and in 2017 he left the world of Chinese officialdom to become the founder and chairman of Zhongguancun Bank, a financial “startup” modeled on Silicon Valley Bank and dedicated to serving local entrepreneurs and innovators. All the pieces were now in place for the flourishing of China’s alternate internet universe. It had the leapfrog technology, the funding, the facilities, the talent, and the environment. The table was set to create internet companies that were new, valuable, and uniquely Chinese. HERE, THERE, AND O2O EVERYWHERE To do all of this, the Chinese internet had to get its hands dirty. For two decades, Chinese internet companies had played a role similar to that of their American peers: information nodes on a digital network.

Oil Panic and the Global Crisis: Predictions and Myths
by Steven M. Gorelick
Published 9 Dec 2009

In remote locations in islands of Indonesia, mobile phones are common and landlines were never part of the technological landscape. In many cases, the use of a resource for particular purposes has been rapidly abandoned in favor of superior substitutes. Ironically, such leapfrogging can, at least temporarily, leave developed regions with lowerlevel technologies than underdeveloped regions, which manage to skip entire generations of outmoded gadgets. The concept of end-use services goes far beyond the lessons learned about impending copper depletion, a widely held belief in the 1970s. For example, does the world need all of the jet fuel that it consumes?

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

Wilson, Dominic, and Roopa Purushothaman, “Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050.” Global Economics Paper No. 99. Goldman Sachs, Oct. 2003. Wilson, Sloan, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Penguin Classics, 2005. Winston, Clifford, and Fred Mannering, “Implementing Technology to Improve Public Highway Performance: A Leapfrog Technology from the Private Sector Is Going to Be Necessary.” Economics of Transportation, 3.2 (2014): 158–65. Woodward, Bob, Maestro: Greenspan’s Fed and the American Boom. Simon & Schuster, 2000. WTO, “World Trade Report 2008.” World Trade Organization, 2008. Xie, Ye, “Goldman’s BRIC Era Ends as Fund Folds after Years of Losses.”

Imagining India
by Nandan Nilekani
Published 25 Nov 2008

But we desperately need further tough-love policies that address the entire legacy of bad power generation policies—our lumbering, financially sick state boards, the incomplete metering at the end-user level, electricity leakage and unchecked theft. Importing inefficiencies People have made much of India’s and China’s ability to leapfrog in technologies and operational models, which enabled young, emerging economies to adopt the latest models of growth from the developed world. These “late bloomer” economies can choose the shortest paths to development, with the kinks already ironed out. As a consequence the GDP growth of U.S. and European economies during the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries fades in comparison with the growth of India and China in the last couple of decades.dg The growth of India’s software industry is a microcosm of these broader patterns of economic growth.

…

As a consequence the GDP growth of U.S. and European economies during the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries fades in comparison with the growth of India and China in the last couple of decades.dg The growth of India’s software industry is a microcosm of these broader patterns of economic growth. Through the 1990s, India’s IT/ITES industry adopted new technologies, work-flow processes and operational standards at an astonishing pace. Within a few years, Indian IT firms had in place the infrastructure that had taken American companies decades to develop. This leapfrogging over older and less efficient technology, manufacturing models, infrastructure and regulation has taken place across our industry and has enabled rapid gains in productivity and economic growth. However, we do have an unfortunate habit of importing existing developed market inefficiencies wholesale—by adopting, for instance, energy-intensive manufacturing and operational processes that have persisted since the 1950s and 1960s, when fuel was cheap, reliable and plentiful.

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Energy savings are not a core focus across Indian businesses. An Indian business—even one with an expensive power generator—is often apathetic toward investments for heat and power recovery in machinery, low-cost electric equipment for consumers and heat-saving materials. If we have been able to leapfrog inefficient technologies and infrastructure, we ought to do the same with inefficient behaviors. “When tough energy standards have been introduced, they have caught on without much trouble,” Albert Hieronimus, head of Robert Bosch in India, tells me. He points out the success of Indian automobiles such as Tata Nano in developing new small-car technologies that meet strict emission standards.

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

Regarding the quote in the section title, see Ramsey Nasser, “Unplain Text,” Increment 5 (April 2018), https://increment.com/programming-languages/unplain-text-primer-on-non-latin/. 29. Kupferschmidt, “On the Diffusion of ‘Small’ Western Technologies,” 239. 30. M. R. Bhagavan, “Technological Leapfrogging by Developing Countries,” in Globalization of Technology, ed. Prasada Reddy (Oxford: EOLSS Publishers, 2009), 48–49. 31. Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring, “Introduction: the Multilingual Internet,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 9, no. 1 (November 2003), https://doi-org.du.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2003.tb00354.x. 32.

Money, Real Quick: The Story of M-PESA
by Tonny K. Omwansa , Nicholas P. Sullivan and The Guardian
Published 28 Feb 2012

Mobile money is the rare case in which a poor African country is the global market leader and an exporter of innovation. If the mobile phone revolution in developing countries was Leapfrog Round 1, as people gobbled up information and communications technology (ICT) from private operators that moribund government telecoms were not providing them, the mobile money revolution is Leapfrog Round 2. Mobile phones were adopted at a faster rate than any technology in history; mobile money, in Kenya at least, is being adopted at a faster rate than mobile phones. If the mobile phone revolution in the South equates to the Industrial Revolution in the West, what is the parallel for the mobile money revolution?

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******ebook converter DEMO Watermarks******* Contents Introduction Chapter 1: THE INNOVATION Chapter 2: THE HUMAN NETWORK Chapter 3: BANKS DISRUPTED Chapter 4: IMPACT AT THE BASE OF THE PYRAMID Chapter 5: INCHING TOWARD “FINANCIAL INCLUSION” Chapter 6: SWAHILI SILICON VALLEY Chapter 7: CHANGE IS NOT EASY Chapter 8: KENYA ON STAGE Chapter 9: CASH IS THE ENEMY! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ******ebook converter DEMO Watermarks******* Introduction Changing Lives: Innovation, Disruption and Transformation “Mobile phone technology has in a few years of its existence demonstrated how financial inclusion can be leapfrogged on a major scale and in a short time span using appropriate technological platforms.”- Njungunua Ndung’u, Governor, Central Bank of Kenya “A world first, M-PESA is indeed a disruptive, leapfrog idea. A continuation of Professor Schumpeter’s creative destruction with a Kenyan face.” - David Mataen, Columnist, The Daily Nation Two-and-a-half billion adults in the world don’t have bank accounts, but about half of these unbanked have mobile phones.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us
by James Ball
Published 19 Aug 2020

The so-called ‘final mile’, the last stretch of the internet that connects up our laptop, tablet or phone, is now often wireless – thanks to 3G and 4G. This is particularly the case in the developing world, which often never got the landline technology ubiquitous elsewhere, but which is now leapfrogging such technologies and jumping directly for mobile. However, wireless technology as a primary source of connectivity is coming to the West, too – in the form of 5G, the impending successor to 4G which is being hyped as ‘up to a thousand times faster’ than existing mobile internet speeds. As ever, that theoretical maximum speed increase should be sensibly disregarded, but it really will be a lot faster, and, in a whole bunch of important ways, a lot smarter – to the point where it could easily replace home connections for many users.

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future
by Ed Conway
Published 15 Jun 2023

Eliminating carbon emissions means having to reimagine the industrial revolution. It means having to rethink nearly every process in the Material World – from smelting metals to producing chemicals to providing energy. We could build a power grid of far greater cleanliness and sustainability than the one we have now. We could provide leapfrog technologies to the developing world, so its inhabitants never have to suffer through centuries of coal-fired power stations and all the accompanying smog and pollution. We could invent new batteries that store many multiples of what today’s cells do. We can create silicon chips of even greater complexity than today’s invisible labyrinths of transistors.

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything
by Steven Levy
Published 2 Feb 1994

Though the Apple II was wonderful for its time, Apple's leaders realized that the company needed new products to remain competitive. They began work on-the Apple III, a machine roughly as powerful as IBM's personal computer would be. But Steve Jobs had an idea for something even more special-Lisa, a computer that would leapfrog Apple's technology, surpassing not only the Apple II, but Apple III as well. This jump would also vault Apple a generation or so past anything that its competitors were preparing. Begun when Steve Wozniak, at Steve Jobs's request, sketched its architecture on a napkin, Lisa had, in less than a year, evolved to a computer based on the powerful Motorola 68000 microprocessor chip, and was engineered to handle more complicated applications, even running several at the same time, a trick called "multitasking."

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 14 May 2014

And China is trying to follow Singapore rather than the West when it comes to welfare as well as democracy: It has extended pension coverage to an additional 240 million rural people in the past two years, far more than the total number of people covered by America’s public-pension system, but it also plainly wants to avoid America’s excesses. It is easy to poke holes in the Asian model—and we poke a lot of them in this book. Singapore is very small. China’s governmental efficiency falls apart at the local level. So far the emerging world has not seized the opportunity to leapfrog ahead that technology has presented it with. Brazil is heading toward a pension crisis that could dwarf even those in Greece and Detroit. India may have a few of the most innovative hospitals in the world, but it has some of the lousiest roads and laziest politicians. But do not be fooled into thinking that the emerging world is miles behind.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Published 23 May 2016

Countries that have good education systems, do a lot of their own research and industry, and have the budgets to build supporting infrastructure can put new technologies and ideas to use much faster than countries that don’t.‡ The digital divide is a current case in point, with big social consequences. The Internet and mobile technologies help leapfrog barriers to information, education and communication. More than any other technology today, telecom infrastructure is progress. But it’s not equally available. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) maintains a ranking of over 150 countries by their level of telecom infrastructure, including telephone and mobile penetration, household computer and Internet access, and wired and wireless broadband subscriptions.

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
by Rose George
Published 13 Oct 2008

Canadian academic Gregory Rose points to the example of cell phone technology. Developing countries without phone systems didn’t bother with telephone poles and underground cables. They vaulted directly to cell phones and satellite communications. Similarly in sanitation, Rose writes, “The opportunity I see for developing countries is to leapfrog over the dinosaur technologies we have funded and implemented in the North and move to these advanced technologies,” such as composting latrines or waste stabilization ponds. It is time for appropriate sanitation technology, not blind faith in flushing. The other fashionable concept is sustainability. This has penetrated even the rich world of engineering certainties and infrastructurally invasive sewers and wastewater treatment plants.

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A four-year study by the Natural Resources Defense Council into America’s bottled water industry found that a quarter of bottled “mineral” waters are in fact municipal tap water. Erik D. Olson, “Bottled Water: Pure Drink or Pure Hype?” Natural Resources Defense Council, February 1999, available at http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bw/bwinx.asp. The consumer just doesn’t seem to care Davis, “Would Madam Care to Taste.” Leapfrog over dinosaur technologies Stephen Dale, “Regenerative Solutions for Managing Community-Generated Organic Waste,” Reports (magazine of the International Development Research Center), February 4, 2000, available at http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-5574-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html. 11.5 watts Graham Lawton, “Pee-Cycling,” New Scientist, December 20, 2006.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power
by Michael A. Cusumano , Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie
Published 6 May 2019

The top hybrid companies in China also expanded from one platform type to the second type and operated their platforms and other businesses with different degrees of integration. Many Chinese users do not use personal computers or credit cards very frequently, so Chinese companies in some sense have leapfrogged these technologies. They have made the smartphone and applications like WeChat into a single platform for many activities and services. Tencent provides a good illustration. It started out in 1998 with a messaging platform (QQ) for Chinese users of personal computers, and generated income from advertising and a premium messaging service.

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World
by Paul Gilding
Published 28 Mar 2011

What if China can maintain stability and lead the way on the environmental and technology transformation now under way? Will China’s very different approach to decision making, democratic freedoms, and open society be a hindrance, as many commentators argue? Or will it be an advantage, enabling them to leapfrog in technology and drive change without the pesky limitations of Western democracies’ corporate lobbying and populist politics slowing down change? If China succeeds and the United States fails, the implications could go well beyond the shift in economic competitiveness and wealth. It could undermine the moral authority of democracy and lead to a shift in global geopolitics back toward autocratic regimes.

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom
by Martin Jacques
Published 12 Nov 2009

(Britain’s GDP expanded at a shade over 2 per cent and the United States at slightly over 4.2 per cent per annum between 1820 and 1870, their fastest period of growth in the nineteenth century.)4 The result has been the rapid and progressive transformation of a region with a population of around 2 billion people, with poverty levels falling to less than a quarter by 2007 (compared with 29.5 per cent in 2006 and 69 per cent in 1990).5 The myth that it was impossible for latecomers to break into the club of advanced nations has been exploded. The Asian tigers have instead demonstrated that latecomers can enjoy major advantages: they can learn from the experience of others, draw on and apply existing technologies, leapfrog old technologies, use the latest know-how and play catch-up to great effect. Their economic approach, furthermore, has largely been homespun, owing relatively little to neo-liberalism or the Washington Consensus - the dominant Western ideology from the late seventies until the financial meltdown in 2008.6 Nor is their novelty confined to the economic sphere.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

Meanwhile half the country has access to the internet. Importantly, this high level of connectivity has developed in a different manner to wealthier countries across Europe and North America. Rather than copying the sequence of infrastructure seen there – adopting the landline and then the mobile phone – Nigeria simply leapfrogged the former technology and adopted mobile internet en masse. No technology has ever scaled as quickly as the mobile phone. It has allowed millions of people to open bank accounts in Kenya and Tanzania, register to vote in Libya, and access agricultural information in Turkey. Research reveals that mobile phone use is as common in Nigeria and South Africa as it is in the United States, with about 90 per cent of adults owning one – making it the most rapidly adopted technology in history.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Jan 2015

“There are actually a lot of African people here doing things,” she says. It’s important to resist the impulse to view cryptocurrencies’ technology, or any technology, as a panacea. For all the promise that technology holds—this idea that developing nations are going to “leapfrog” decades of development thanks to cheap, distributed, decentralized technology—the reality on the ground resists easy solutions. What M-Pesa has achieved, and what BitPesa promises, matter because they are effective tools for promoting economic activity, and thus development. This is why the stories coming out of Silicon Savannah are important—not only for Kenya but for the developing world as a whole.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
by John Hagel Iii and John Seely Brown
Published 12 Apr 2010

Of course, exponential rates like these cannot be sustained forever, but for the foreseeable future the technologists driving innovation in these domains see scant evidence of a flattening of performance-improvement curves for key digital technology components—even if other advances in the labs today, such as quantum computing, might eventually leapfrog today’s technologies altogether. The absence of stabilization in the core technology components suggests that we are not likely to see stabilization in the digital infrastructure either. More than thirty years into this technology revolution, we are just now beginning to explore the contours of cloud computing.

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse
by Mohamed A. El-Erian
Published 26 Jan 2016

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages
by Carlota Pérez
Published 1 Jan 2002

Against Intellectual Monopoly
by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine
Published 6 Jul 2008

In these early stages, capacity constraints are binding, so cost reductions of competitors do not lower industry prices, as the latter are completely determined by the willingness of consumers to pay for a novel and scarce good. So the innovator correctly figures that by sharing his innovation he loses nothing but may benefit from one of his competitors leapfrogging his technology and lowering his own cost. The economic gains from lowering his own cost, or improving his own product, when capacity constraints are binding, are so large that they easily dwarf the gains from monopoly pricing. It is only when an industry is mature, cost-reducing or quality-improving innovations are P1: KNP head margin: 1/2 gutter margin: 7/8 CUUS245-06 cuus245 978 0 521 87928 6 May 21, 2008 16:48 How Competition Works 137 harder to bring about, and productive capacity is no longer a constraint on demand that monopoly profits become relevant.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 28 Jun 2020

General Assembly document A/42/427, ¶ 63 (1987), United Nations, http://www.un-documents.net/wced-ocf.htm. 24. Ibid. 25. Charles Recknagel, “What Can Norway Teach Other Oil-Rich Countries?,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, November 27, 2014, https://www.rferl.org/a/what-can-norway-teach-other-oil-rich-countries/26713453.html. 26. José Goldemberg, “Leapfrog Energy Technologies,” Energy Policy 26, no. 10 (1998): 729–41, https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/sed/docs/k4dev/goldemberg_energypolicy1998.pdf. 27. Mark Malloch Brown, Nitin Desai, Gerald Doucet et al., World Energy Assessment: Energy and the Challenge of Sustainability, United Nations Development Programme, 2000, https://www.undp.org/content/dam/aplaws/publication/en/publications/environment-energy/www-ee-library/sustainable-energy/world-energy-assessment-energy-and-the-challenge-of-sustainability/World%20Energy%20Assessment-2000.pdf, 22. 28.

China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle
by Dinny McMahon
Published 13 Mar 2018

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Published 12 Nov 2019

Even in China, which is not a democracy, the pressure of public opinion is said to have contributed to the government’s desire to do something about pollution. In India, it may soon become enough of a public issue to lead to some change. The priority should then be to enact policies that will lead to cleaner consumption patterns, even if they come at some cost. The costs may not be very large. In many cases, India would be able to leapfrog to the cleaner technology (e.g., when the poor finally get electricity, they get LED bulbs). In some cases, the new technology may be more expensive than the old (e.g., clean cars may be more expensive than dirty cars). This means the poor will need to be compensated. But the total cost of this is small, and could easily be borne by the elite if the political will was there.

…

There will have to be investments in infrastructure, and meaningful redistribution to those whose livelihoods are affected. In poor countries, money could help the average citizen achieve a higher quality of life in a way less threatening to the future of the world. (Think of the air-conditioning debate, for example; why doesn’t the world simply pay India to leapfrog to the better technology?) Given that the poor do not consume very much, it would not take a lot to help the world’s poor consume a bit more, but also get better air and produce less emissions. The richest countries in the world are so rich they can easily pay for it. The question is to frame the debate in a way that does not pitch the poor in poor countries against the poor in rich countries.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity
by Martin J. Rees
Published 14 Oct 2018

The phrase ‘sustainable development’ gained currency in 1987, when the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, prime minister of Norway, defined it as ‘development that meets the needs of the present—especially the poor—without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.7 We all surely want to ‘sign up’ to reach this goal in the hope that by 2050 there will be a narrower gap between the lifestyle that privileged societies enjoy and that which is available to the rest of the world. This can’t happen if developing countries mimic the path to industrialisation that Europe and North America followed. These countries need to leapfrog directly to a more efficient and less wasteful mode of life. The goal is not anti-technology. More technology will be needed, but channeled appropriately, so that it underpins the needed innovation. The more developed nations must make this transition too. Information technology (IT) and social media are now globally pervasive. Rural farmers in Africa can access market information that prevents them from being ripped off by traders, and they can transfer funds electronically.

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Broadband internet, soon to achieve worldwide reach via low-orbiting satellites, high-altitude balloons, or solar-powered drones, should further stimulate education and the adoption of modern health care, agricultural methods, and technology; even the poorest can thereby leapfrog into a connected economy and enjoy social media—even though many are still denied the benefits of nineteenth-century technological advances such as proper sanitation. People in Africa can use smartphones to access market information, make mobile payments, and so forth; China has the most automated financial system in the world. These developments have a ‘consumer surplus’ and generate enterprise and optimism in the developing world.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2014

But competitive advantages (higher profits) from superior organisational forms, machines or, for example, tighter inventory control were usually short-lived. Competing firms could quickly adopt the new methods (unless, of course, the technologies were patented or protected by monopoly power). The outcome would be leapfrogging innovations in technologies across sectors. I sound a note of scepticism here because the history of capital demonstrates a penchant for monopoly rather than competition and this would not be so favourable for innovation. Instead, we find a strong collective generic preference – a culture as it were – emerging among capitalists for increasing efficiency and productivity across all capitalist enterprises with or without the driving force of competition.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends
by Richard Dobbs and James Manyika
Published 12 May 2015

China already has more than six hundred million Internet users, equivalent to 20 percent of the global Internet population.23 More than a quarter of Brazilians using the Internet have opened Twitter accounts, making Brazil the world’s second-most enthusiastic tweeting nation.24 In India, consumers are leapfrogging the traditional technology trajectory. Landlines may be slow to reach remote villages, but more than nine hundred million Indians are mobile users.25 A desire to cater to the nearly 300 million Indians who are illiterate is spurring the development of voice-activated websites and services.26 Of Facebook’s 100 million users in India, more than 80 percent access their accounts through mobile devices.27 In 2013, we witnessed two firsts for the Chinese e-commerce market.

The Future Is Asian
by Parag Khanna
Published 5 Feb 2019

The Jakarta-based e-commerce company Sale Stock Indonesia is using artificial intelligence (AI) to figure out how to cut costs on products that don’t sell well by screening out designs that an algorithm designates as likely to fail. Though many Western economists have portrayed Asia’s rise as merely catching up with the West, it could well be that Asia is leapfrogging it. Asia no longer faces deficiencies in the money, technology, or talent needed to fund and scale companies in any industry. An older generation of Asians has been accustomed to receiving Western technology and having to figure out how it could suit their needs. But today Asians are focused on finding Asian solutions to Asian problems.

…

Asians view the remaining poverty in their midst as an opportunity to continue the mission of eradicating it through infrastructure investment, urbanization, economic growth, education, financial inclusion, and digitization. Ever more of Asia is joining in the largest-scale case of what economists call the advantage of late development, or “second-mover advantage”: leapfrogging over traditional technologies and behaviors to the newest standards. Mobile phones come before landlines, digital banking before ATMs, cloud computing before desktops, electronic road payments before toll booths, and solar and wind power instead of oil and gas. Asian countries are going from no ID cards or taxes to biometric IDs and digital tax collection.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
by Geoffrey West
Published 15 May 2017

In the United States alone there are more than a trillion phone calls made each year, and on average a typical person spends more than three hours a day fixated by his or her cell phone. Almost twice as many people have access to cell phones in the world as they do to toilets—an interesting comment on our priorities. This has been a huge boon to even the poorest countries, as they have been able to leapfrog traditional technology and jump immediately into twenty-first-century communication infrastructure at a fraction of the huge cost of installing and maintaining landlines, which most were unable to afford at the scale of coverage that mobile technology provides. It is no surprise that proportionally the greatest percentage of mobile phone usage occurs in developing countries.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

” * * * — GETTING THE REQUIRED DATA to build Jucikas’s envisioned targeting system would not be easy, but it was possible, due to a fluke of history in some parts of the developing world. Although there was substantial underdevelopment of traditional telecommunications infrastructure, largely stemming from corruption and the neglectful legacies of colonial administrations, some of the world’s poorest countries had leapfrogged generations of technology, achieving impressive advances in mobile networks. In Kenya, for example, local laws and customs made it difficult for some people to get a bank account, leading to a system in which Kenyans used cash to buy mobile phone credits, which could then be traded as a kind of digital currency.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019)
by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig
Published 15 Mar 2020

Many studies show the wide use of deliberate and proactive technology and industrial policies targeting selected industries to achieve growth, development and employment goals (Salazar-Xirinachs et al. 2014). For example, the so-called green economy aims to protect the environment while also creating good jobs, and leap-frogging into strategic technologies can create steep learning curves and new innovation capabilities that are required to sustain the innovation dynamics. Moreover, policies to promote small and medium-sized enterprises, the “new artisan economy” and the crafts sectors, have a high potential to create new jobs in the middle skills level (Katz 2014).

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World
by Branko Milanovic
Published 23 Sep 2019

Thanks to their insertion into global supply chains, it became a reality. The way to interpret Asia’s success in the current era is not by seeing China, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and so on as the latest versions of South Korea. They are the trailblazers of a new road to development which, through integrating one’s economy to the developed world, leapfrogs over several technological and institutional stages. The most successful countries in the second globalization are those that, because of institutional factors, the skill and cost of their labor, and their geographical proximity to the North, are able to become an integral part of the Northern economy. This pattern inverts the old dependencia paradigm, which held that delinking was the way to develop.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold
Published 24 Dec 2011

Credit Sputnik for the way computers changed. In 1957, motivated by the groundbreaking entry of Soviet technology in orbit, the U.S. Department of Defense created the Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA hired an MIT professor by the name of J.C.R. Licklider to lead an effort to leapfrog over existing computer technology. ARPA contractors created software that would display the results of computations as graphical displays on screens instead of printouts. Most importantly, they created software “operating systems” that enabled the community of programmers/ users to interact directly with computers.

…

In 1960, Licklider’s article, “Man-Machine Symbiosis” envisioned computers as neither substitute nor slave but partner for human thought: “The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computers will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human being has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”81 Licklider’s vision might have remained obscure if Sputnik had not frightened the U.S. Department of Defense into creating ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, to fund wild ideas that could leapfrog conventional research. Licklider was put in charge of ARPA’s Information Processing Technology Office in the early 1960s, where he sponsored the creation of blue sky technologies that conventional computer manufacturers weren’t interested in—the graphical interface, the personal computer, and computer networks.82 The problems to be overcome in achieving such a partnership between computers and humans were only partially a matter of building better computers and only partially a matter of learning how minds interact with information.

Shipping Greatness
by Chris Vander Mey
Published 23 Aug 2012

When I looked at our millions of Google Apps customers and industry trends, I saw an emerging market segment composed of workers who were increasingly distributed and working from home. On top of that, the conference-calling space was huge, and we had powerful assets in Google Voice that we could offer to users. Given this data, I argued that we should try to lead the market in low-cost unified communications for businesses. This strategy would enable us to leapfrog Skype’s older technology and undercut Microsoft’s more expensive systems in the SMB and Midmarket segments. Ultimately, you can see that Google didn’t follow this strategy, choosing instead to emphasize its social efforts and Google+ Hangouts. But you get the point. As you think about your company, customers, and competition, pay special attention to how your product will serve your customers better than the competition’s product in the long term.

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat
by John P. Carlin and Garrett M. Graff
Published 15 Oct 2018

Evan Osnos, a staff writer for the New Yorker who covered China, wrote that the country’s subsequent rise is “a transformation one hundred times the scale, and ten times the speed, of the first Industrial Revolution.”15 In 1978, the average Chinese income was just $200, and as late as 2005, a quarter of a billion Chinese—a population only slightly smaller than the entire United States—still lived on less than $1.25 a day, and its per capita income was still under around $3,000.16 But by 2014, per capita income had leapt to $6,000, doubling in just ten years. The internet and digital world were key drivers in that growth; in many realms, digital advances have helped China leapfrog generations of technology and industry in the Western world as it industrialized and modernized with stunning rapidity. The internet arrived in China in January 1996, at a time when the country had just five telephone lines per hundred residents.17 By August of that year, China was beginning to restrict certain online content, and just a year later Wired coined the term “Great Firewall,” denoting the system through which China throttled open access to the world beyond and prohibited certain types of potentially threatening political content.18* China has no formal equivalent to the American term cyber.

Geography of Bliss
by Eric Weiner
Published 1 Jan 2008

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang
Published 27 Feb 2012

Factoring out Obama’s Kennedyesque charisma and undeniable oratorical skills, I can objectively say that he delivered a powerful, hopeful message for the future of America’s space exploration—a vision that would lead us to multiple places beyond low Earth orbit, asteroids included. He also reaffirmed the need to retire the space shuttle and spoke longingly of Mars. President Obama even went one step further, suggesting that since we’ve already been to the Moon, why return at all? Been there, done that. With an advanced launch vehicle—one that leapfrogs previous rocket technologies but would take many years to develop—we could bypass the Moon altogether and head straight for Mars by the mid-2030s, right about when Obama expects 80 percent of Americans to abandon cars and planes, and instead travel to and fro via high-speed rail. I was there. I felt the energy of the room.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Published 15 Mar 2009

The book spells out how companies can reach the world’s 4 billion poor and deliver goods and services at the interface between the formal and informal economies. Prahalad writes that the poor shop after seven P.M.; they buy in tiny quantities; they welcome relief from the premium prices they often have to pay to slum (sometimes criminal) monopolies; and they are comfortable leapfrogging to new technologies. Corporations are right to pay attention to what is now referred to as the BOP—bottom of the pyramid. A large portion of humanity on the loose, trying new things in new cities, is a lot of potential customers, collaborators, and competitors, and while the income of the poor is currently small, it is growing fast.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

These American contributions to China’s technological prowess are all the more significant because of the coming shift in warfare. Until recently, the U.S. military edge was assured by its superiority in areas such as stealth aircraft, aircraft carriers, and precision munitions. But China’s military leaders aim to leapfrog those technologies by establishing a lead in AI weaponry: swarms of cheap, expendable, autonomous drones could make aircraft carriers obsolete.[49] U.S. commanders understand AI’s potential equally well, but they seem locked into the weapons-purchasing habits that brought them dominance in the past—a sort of military version of the innovator’s dilemma.

Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire
by Hans Gremeil and William Sposato
Published 15 Dec 2021

Nissan and Renault, he pledged, would have seven more all-electric nameplates by then. * * * By any measure, Ghosn was a pioneer in trailblazing new frontiers in the auto industry. He saw a future for electric vehicles while rivals were still dabbling in gasoline-electric hybrids. He wanted to leapfrog that halfway technology, then championed by archrival Toyota, and land straight into what he saw as a radical new future of zero emissions cars. And Ghosn stole a lead on the competitors again in 2013, when he declared that Nissan would develop self-driving cars and have them for sale in 2020. At the time, even high-end luxury brands such as Mercedes-Benz and BMW were offering just rudimentary driver-assist features that could only aid steering and braking at low speeds.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

Uber’s innovation, though, was to radically simplify the purchase experience. Payment without any visible act of payment, as much as the ability to summon the car, is what makes everyone’s first ride with Uber such a WTF? moment. Understanding that what used to be hard is now free and easy due to the work of others is essential to the leapfrogging progress of technology. Robin Chase, author of the book Peers Inc, describes how services ranging from Zipcar, which she founded in 1999, to Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb are all platforms for unlocking what she calls “excess capacity” and sharing it with others. They put together ordinary people (“the peers”) and a platform (“the Inc”) to do something neither could do alone.

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Rwanda is a country with underdeveloped hospital infrastructure and often-impassable roads. Postpartum hemorrhage is one of the leading causes of death among women. It has never been possible to stock enough of the various blood types needed at remote clinics, but Keller and his cofounders have found a way to leapfrog over the lack of twentieth-century infrastructure and instead use the WTF? technologies of the twenty-first to solve a seemingly intractable problem. From only three drone airfields paired with blood storage facilities, the company can get blood to clinics anywhere in the country within fifteen minutes. The company has raised $43 million in venture capital, with the latest round of $25 million intended to build distribution in other markets, including Vietnam, Indonesia, and, if regulatory barriers can be overcome, the United States.

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry
by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff
Published 6 Apr 2015

Lazaridis explained that he wanted to bring proper “push” e-mail to the Leapfrog—e-mail that arrived automatically on the device without requiring users to log in and download their messages. Users shouldn’t have to forward their work e-mails to the handheld devices—they should be able to send and receive e-mails wirelessly as if the Leapfrog was a portable, synchronized extension of their desktop computers. Surely the company had the know-how and technology to do this. There were two major issues, security and bandwidth. An e-mail had to be encrypted at the point of transmission and only decrypted when it reached its destination. And whatever RIM designed had to respect the limited capacity of the Mobitex technology: a message would have to be limited to a kilobyte or two of data.

Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China
by Desmond Shum
Published 6 Sep 2021

Edward Tian was a key ingredient. Even before AsiaInfo listed in New York, a Chinese state-owned company founded by Jiang Mianheng, the son of China’s Communist Party boss, Jiang Zemin, had lured him away to join a firm called Netcom that had been given the mission of leapfrogging China into the forefront of information technology by laying fiber-optic cable throughout the country. Some of the cities Netcom wired with broadband had never had phone service before. Over a ten-month period in the early 2000s, Netcom workers laid six thousand miles of fiber-optic cable and connected China’s seventeen largest cities to the World Wide Web.

Howard Rheingold
by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)
Published 26 Apr 2012

In October 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the people who were responsible for maintaining the state of the art in U.S. military technology were shocked into action. To keep up with the pace of technical developments, the Department of Defense created the Advanced Research Projects Agency with a specific mandate to leapfrog over existing technology, bypassing, if necessary, the standard process of peer-reviewed research proposals. ARPA had a license to look for visionaries and wild ideas and sift them for viable schemes. When Licklider suggested that new ways of using computers not only were valuable to weapons and air defense technologies but also could improve the quality of research across the board by giving scientists and office workers better tools, he was hired to organize ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office.

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes
by Phillip Brown , Hugh Lauder and David Ashton
Published 3 Nov 2010

He was also able to stay in regular contact with his extended family living in a rural area outside the city. In another conversation on the same visit to India, we were told that “the concept of a mobile phone from something being seen as a status symbol to being a common status has taken 4 years.” This has enabled them to leapfrog all the developments in communication technologies, avoiding the expense and time it takes to cable vast cities and rural expanses, as erecting cellular towers is faster and cheaper. But the trends described in this chapter can’t be explained simply in terms of new technologies; otherwise, virtually all developing economies could match the growth rates of India and China, which is something other countries have spectacularly failed to achieve.26 Why we have witnessed these changes in China and India rather than sub-Saharan Africa requires a complex answer that is beyond the scope of this book.

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India
by Edward Luce
Published 23 Aug 2006

By 2030 India is projected to have 200 million vehicles, public and private, compared to 40 million in 2006.21 Quite apart from urban air quality, or more mundane issues such as parking space, it is hard to imagine a road-building program that could keep up with Indian vehicle demand. An India with five times as many vehicles as today (and rising) is a vision of purgatory. There are many areas, such as telecoms, in which mobile phones are booming without fixed line service having improved very much, where India has leapfrogged a stage of development by exploiting new technology. India can leapfrog the classic stage of traffic gridlock by planning now for cleaner and more efficient urban transport systems. India already has some projects, such as the New Delhi Metro, which point the way forward. Every Indian city needs a New Delhi Metro, in spite of the high capital costs and subsidies that are involved in such mass transit projects.

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations
by Nandan Nilekani
Published 4 Feb 2016

In her book Vikram Sarabhai: A Life, Amrita Shah writes: By 1970, his list (of space applications) had expanded to include agriculture, forestry, oceanography, geology, mineral prospecting and cartography . . . This was Vikram’s dream: linking technology with development, serving the needs of the masses while nurturing a highly sophisticated work culture and scientific abilities. One of his favourite phrases was ‘leapfrogging’. It referred to his great faith, along with Bhabha and Nehru, in the ability of technology to enable developing countries to circumvent the long, arduous processes followed by the Western world.18 India’s self-sufficiency in foodgrains and milk are also the results of start-ups: the Green Revolution, powered by scientists like Norman Borlaug and bureaucrats like M.S.

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This kind of learning can take place both in schools and outside them, allowing students to consume ‘bytes’ of individualized learning, much like the Khan Academy model. The child-friendly EkStep user interface will be supported by collaborative content and a scalable technology platform, which can be distributed through multiple channels. Ravi Gururaj, the chairman of NASSCOM’s product council, has said that a project like this ‘leapfrogs the status quo, leverages technology to the hilt, delivers massive platform value and transforms early education across the nation for all classes of citizens’.11 The fundamental idea behind EkStep has also received validation from Bill Gates, who thinks that, ‘Rapid advances in education software on mobile phones will change the way students and teachers around the world learn every day.’12 When it comes to higher education, the traditional university experience and method of education are being challenged by MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
by Adam Greenfield
Published 14 Sep 2006

The Curse of Cash
by Kenneth S Rogoff
Published 29 Aug 2016

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
by David Brooks
Published 8 Mar 2011

But I’m here to tell you that when this revolution is complete, you will see how careful the planning has been. Soon we will be taking another series of steps that will take us deeper into programming, deeper into growth markets and social networking. These acquisitions will revolutionize this company. We immediately double our contact with viewers and customers. We leapfrog over recent technology and put ourselves in a position to transform our industry. We will embark on a dramatic effort to restructure our company and reshape our identity.” He went on in this vein for a while, then a few members of his deference committee got up and presented some projections and growth numbers.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity
by Peter Schwartz , Peter Leyden and Joel Hyatt
Published 18 Oct 2000

That ability to forgive is one of the foundations of the healing process going on in South Africa, and it could be a key to rapid progress for all of Africa in the future. Africa can also ride some very fortuitous global technological trends. The newest generations of the best technology often cost less than the old ones, and Africans can get the newest, best, cheapest technology at the same time as people in the developed world, thus leapfrogging stages of development. Also, technologies are becoming The Global CtwllENtjES 141 much more decentralized, so that much less up-front investment is required to set up elaborate infrastructures. In telecommunications, wireless phone systems are much cheaper and quicker to install than was running land lines through crowded cities.

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology
by Anu Bradford
Published 25 Sep 2023

In a 2018 speech, President Xi emphasized that “accelerating the development of a new generation of AI is an important strategic handhold for China to gain the initiative in global science and technology competition, and it is an important strategic resource driving our country’s leapfrog development in science and technology, its industrial optimization and upgrading, and a comprehensive leap ahead in productivity.”4 At the same time, President Xi has made it clear that this goal of reaching a cyber-superpower status cannot undermine political discipline.5 For instance, in 2010, China’s top information bureau—the State Council Information Office—published a white paper titled “The Internet in China,” which highlighted how the internet is “an issue that concerns national economic prosperity and development, state security and social harmony, state sovereignty and dignity, and the basic interests of the people.”6 It must be free of “information that contains content subverting state power, undermining national unity, infringing upon national honor and interests.”7 These statements reveal how China harnesses digital technologies to reinforce three key sources of Chinese leadership’s legitimacy: economic growth, social stability, and nationalism.8 The Chinese state-driven regulatory model has fostered a powerful tech industry.

…

Measured by market capitalization, China has eight of the twenty largest public internet companies—Tencent, Alibaba, Meituan, and JD among the top ten as of August 2022.9 When private internet companies are included, ByteDance also joins the top ten based on June 2022 data.10 In some domains of technology, including electronic payments, China has leapfrogged the US, leading the way with the development and market uptake of such technologies.11 Chinese cellphone maker Xiaomi briefly surpassed Apple and became the second largest smartphone maker globally in 2021.12 China also leads as a producer of telecom network equipment and commercial drones.13 TikTok’s popularity—as demonstrated by the company surpassing Facebook as the most visited social media website in 202114—has further shown that Chinese tech companies’ innovations extend into social media, a space traditionally dominated by US companies.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

Brown and Lauder cite a global law firm headquartered in New York that has moved some of the work previously given to newly qualified lawyers in London or New York with annual salaries of around $100,000 to law graduates in the Philippines, where the same work is done for less than $15,000.4 The barriers to higher education that previously protected the Western middle class are falling. “China and India are succeeding in ‘leap-frogging’ decades of technological development in the West to compete for high-skilled, high-value work, including research and development,” according to Brown and Lauder. China is heading towards 200m graduates in its workforce and is currently graduating three times more students every year than the United States.5 This is not just about more global trade in services following in the footsteps of manufacturing.

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics
by William R. Easterly
Published 1 Aug 2002

A youngengineernamed Nishiyama Yataro emerged as president of Kawasaki Steel and was one of the technological pioneers of the industry.26 In 1952, two Austrian companies invented the basic oxygen furnace to replace the then standard open hearthfurnace. They tried to sell their invention both to the Americans and Japanese. The Americans, who produced ten times more steel than the Japanese and had aheavyinvestmentinopenhearth technology (bywhichthey themselves had leapfrogged over the British, who used the Bessemer process),27 declined the offer of the new basic oxygen technology. 184 Chapter 9 Nishiyama Yataro, in contrast, adopted the technology in the late 1950s, soon followed by other Japanese firms. After the technology was perfected, the oxygen furnace reduced production costs relative to open hearth furnaces by10 to 20 percent and cut refining time to one-tenth of what it was under the old technology.

Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond
by Bruce C. N. Greenwald , Judd Kahn , Paul D. Sonkin and Michael van Biema
Published 26 Jan 2004

A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Carbon Emissions
by Muhammad Yunus
Published 25 Sep 2017

Thanks to these breakthroughs, today’s developing nations are in many ways better positioned than the older industrialized nations to enjoy clean growth. They are not saddled with old legacy technologies—hundreds of power plants built to burn fossil fuels, wired communications grids that require resources to maintain, and old fleets of cars, trucks, and planes that waste fuel. This means they can leapfrog directly to more efficient, cleaner technologies that modern science has made available. There is no reason why we in the developing countries need to tolerate a period of rampant pollution and environmental destruction for the sake of economic growth. And, in fact, the biggest developing nations in the world, China and India, have joined the Paris Agreement that I discussed in Chapter 2 and are taking serious steps to carry out its provisions.

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age
by James Crabtree
Published 2 Jul 2018

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

It could have happened elsewhere – as proven by previous episodes of efflorescences – and it is not impossible anywhere, as shown by the recent wave of globalization, when countries that have opened up their economies have repeated this development: Eastern Europe, East Asia, and now even giants like China, India and Vietnam. They have been able to make the economic transition that the British pioneered, but in just a third or a fifth of the time, partly because they can leapfrog to the latest technologies, and make use of the insights and innovations already made. Apart from a few eccentric voices, such global development is not what the prevailing establishment had in mind. They wanted order and control, just like elites in other regions, but they couldn’t keep up with the ideas, skills and machines that could always move elsewhere.

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small
by Steve Sammartino
Published 25 Jun 2014

The most cited example of this phenomenon is that there are more mobile phone subscriptions (approximately 4.6 billion) around the world than there are toothbrushes1 in use (approximately 4.2 billion). While this point is debatable, what matters is that this revolution has the potential to create a leap-frog effect and that the path to economic development will no longer be linear. Countries could circumvent certain industrial technologies altogether. For example, industrialised, government-funded schooling could leap directly to cloud-based, open-source learning. This is something large conglomerates in the packaged goods, power generation and other industrial stalwart categories should take note of.

China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies Are Changing the Rules of Business
by Edward Tse
Published 13 Jul 2015

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity
by Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne
Published 4 Feb 2013

Soon, there will be full-spectrum solutions that make the remittances, payments, and exchanges of value in a multicurrency environment safe, legitimate, and affordable, where both competitive and cooperative transactions take place seamlessly from an individual’s e-wallet. Well underway, though, is a new wave of remedies in which Internet and mobile technologies provide innovative options for accessing financial ser vices, thus leapfrogging over the predominant modes of expensive banking modalities. At present, there are technology silos that hamper the fluid and seamless movement of money within the marketplace. Mark Fischer, founder of Inspire Commerce and a recognized e-commerce expert, comments, “In closed networks, users are captured in a specific channel. This is a proven business model, yet it is increasingly out of touch with the expectations of digital-era consumers who have come to expect choice and ease of use from online and mobile payment services.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

Across low- and middle-income countries (where national income is less than $12,500 per person per year) a higher GDP tends to go hand-in-hand with greatly increased life expectancy at birth, far fewer children dying before the age of five, and many more children going to school.14 Given that 80% of the world’s population live in such countries, and the vast majority of their inhabitants are under 25 years old, significant GDP growth is very much needed and it is very likely coming. With sufficient international support these countries can seize the opportunity to leapfrog the wasteful and polluting technologies of the past. And if they channel GDP growth into creating economies that are distributive and regenerative by design, they will start bringing all of their inhabitants above the Doughnut’s social foundation without overshooting its ecological ceiling. It is, however, in today’s high-income but low-growth countries that the growth debate is most pressing, with some beginning to wonder whether the top of the S curve is coming within view.

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age
by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne
Published 9 Sep 2019

He and his new chief of staff, Mike Shields, undertook a top-to-bottom review of the RNC’s operations in the wake of the 2012 defeat, including its technology strategy. And as often happens in the fast-paced world of technology, there emerged an opportunity to leapfrog the competition. Priebus and Shields utilized data models from three Republican technology consulting firms and embedded them in-house at the RNC. While they lacked easy access to the Democratic-leaning talent pool in Silicon Valley, they brought in a new CTO from the University of Michigan and a young technologist from the Virginia Department of Transportation to build new algorithms for the world of politics.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives
by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Published 22 Apr 2013

People will have access to ubiquitous wireless Internet networks that are many times cheaper than they are now. We’ll be more efficient, more productive and more creative. In the developing world, public wireless hot spots and high-speed home networks will reinforce each other, extending the online experience to places where people today don’t even have landline phones. Societies will leapfrog an entire generation of technology. Eventually, the accoutrements of technologies we marvel at today will be sold in flea markets as antiques, like rotary phones before them. And as adoption of these tools increases, so too will their speed and computing power. Moore’s Law, the rule of thumb in the technology industry, tells us that processor chips—the small circuit boards that form the backbone of every computing device—double in speed every eighteen months.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre
Published 18 Jan 2023

Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping said in a 2018 Politburo session, “Accelerating the development of a new generation of AI is an important strategic handhold for China to gain the initiative in global science and technology competition, and it is an important strategic resource driving our country’s leapfrog development in science and technology.” Reflecting on China’s emphasis on AI, Schmidt said, “There’s no question that there was a Sputnik moment and it was in China. And the Sputnik moment was when AlphaGo beat the Chinese champion and Chinese care a great deal about the game of go.” Ke Jie, who at the time was the world’s number one go player, lost to DeepMind’s AlphaGo in 2017.

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?
by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland
Published 15 Jan 2021

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 1 Jan 2010

The trouble is that the excess profit that accrues to them is ephemeral because competitors can catch up with and even leap over their technological and organisational advantage. Fierce, and what capitalists sometimes call ‘ruinous’ competition tends, therefore, to produce leap-frogging innovations that more often than not lead capitalists to fetishise technological and organisational innovation as the answer to all their prayers (including the disciplining of labour in both the market and the labour process). This fetishism is fed upon to the degree that innovation itself becomes a business that seeks to form its own market by persuading each and every one of us that we cannot survive without having the latest gadget and gismo at our command.

How Asia Works
by Joe Studwell
Published 1 Jul 2013

The ministry trumpeted the launch of a CRH380 locomotive, with a top speed of 380 kilometres per hour – faster than any train operating in the world. In 2011, however, it became clear that all was not as it seemed. In February, Minister of Railways Liu Zhijun – nicknamed ‘Leap Liu’ for his promises to leapfrog Chinese railways into global technological leadership – was summarily sacked and placed under investigation for ‘severe violation of discipline’, a CPC euphemism for corruption. The retired deputy director of the ministry’s high-speed department then made unusually candid remarks in the Chinese press, saying that high-speed trains were running faster than those of foreign technology suppliers only because Liu’s Ministry of Railways authorised much lower safety tolerances than German or Japanese operators.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution
by Klaus Schwab
Published 11 Jan 2016

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
by Edward L. Glaeser
Published 1 Jan 2011

But however different their office space, the shoestring start-up and the established IT enterprise share the same remarkable energy and the same focus on selling their products worldwide. India’s poor roads and weak electricity grid make life difficult for big manufacturing firms, which explains why the country seems to be leapfrogging straight from agriculture to information technology. Anyone who builds a large factory and employs unskilled workers must contend with India’s powerful labor unions. The information technology business is less fettered by these constraints. There are few unions in IT, ideas don’t need roads to move across continents, and every successful Internet firm can afford a backup generator.

No Slack: The Financial Lives of Low-Income Americans
by Michael S. Barr
Published 20 Mar 2012

The Transhumanist Reader
by Max More and Natasha Vita-More
Published 4 Mar 2013

There is some evidence that at present researchers in many developing nations suffer a disadvantage given that they cannot afford to get the important journals in their areas, and their publications seldom get accepted in the global (Western) journals since they have few past publications cited by the citation services (Gibbs 1995). There are equalizing forces too. Many of the results from expensive and time-consuming research appear openly in journals and on the Net, making it possible for others to leapfrog. There is trade. Technology spreads, and rich groups can and do give some of their surplus to others (voluntarily or not). The problem is of course: are these forces enough to keep the differences in technological capability finite? Will this lead to a Singularity scenario where different groups diverge strongly from each other, possibly a situation where just one small group becomes totally technologically dominant?

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live
by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Published 2 Jan 2010

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014

Or what if, in the middle of simulating the effects of a Mount Pinatubo–like eruption, a real Mount Pinatubo erupts. Would we risk bringing on what David Keith has described as “a worldwide Ice Age, a snowball earth,” just because we forgot, yet again, that we are not actually in the driver’s seat?46 The dogged faith in technology’s capacity to allow us to leapfrog out of crisis is born of earlier technological breakthroughs—splitting the atom or putting a man on the moon. And some of the players pushing most aggressively for a techno-fix for climate change were directly involved in those earlier technological triumphs—like Lowell Wood, who helped develop advanced nuclear weaponry, or Gates and Myrhvold, who revolutionized computing.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

So bureaucrats could get in there and they could get themselves beachfront properties.” He added that 60 percent of Honduran land is undocumented. The goal of the project, which has not been signed definitively, is to record the government’s land titles on the blockchain ledger. Kirby told Reuters that Honduras could leapfrog legacy systems used in the developed world by deploying Factom’s blockchain technology, and it would eventually make for more secure mortgages and mineral rights.64 “Documentation for ownership from patents to houses is extraordinarily paper-based, and there’s no reason it should be, other than history. Blockchain works with any transaction or interaction where property rights and timing matters,”65 said Kausik Rajgopal, who heads up McKinsey’s Silicon Valley office and payments practice.

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent
by Douglas Coupland
Published 29 Sep 2014

He started his own cloud storage company (there’s a job description that didn’t exist a decade ago) and joined Alcatel-Lucent in 2008, brought in by Ben Verwaayen. “I’ve seen too much pollution,” he says about his global travels. “I worry about it. Our evolution is too linear: we need to leapfrog to somewhere new, quickly. I mean, what are we learning about ourselves from all this technology that we didn’t know before we had it?” That is perhaps the biggest question of our age. Agogbua sees the human world as “a set of aggregated communities” and sees the tech community as being amazingly small. I ask him where he sees light or hope, and he has some answers that make me feel good.

Writing on the Wall: Social Media - the First 2,000 Years
by Tom Standage
Published 14 Oct 2013

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order
by Rush Doshi
Published 24 Jun 2021

“A new round of technological revolution and industrial change, such as in artificial intelligence, big data, quantum information, and biotechnology, are gathering strength” and bringing “earth-shaking changes” while offering an “important opportunity to promote leapfrog development,” bypassing legacy systems and overtaking competitors.50 Technology leadership could help China realize the potential of the “great changes unseen in a century.” Indeed, most Chinese commentators have argued that the last three revolutions caused a “divergence” that allowed some countries to become geopolitical leaders and left others as geopolitical laggards.

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone
by Satya Nadella , Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols
Published 25 Sep 2017

The combination of industrial policy, public sector investment, and entrepreneurial energy is what many other countries will also look to replicate from China’s success. I see the beginnings of this in India with the creation of the new digital ecosystem known as IndiaStack. India is leapfrogging from once being an infrastructure-poor country to now leading in digital technology. IndiaStack ushers in a presence-less, cashless, paperless economy for all its citizens. On a trip to Bengaluru I engaged in a conversation with Nandan Nilekani about IndiaStack and its future road map. Nandan is the legendary founder of Infosys, who went on to create a new startup working with the Indian Government—Aadhaar—the identity system that is at the center of IndiaStack.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy
by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
Published 4 Sep 2013

The hotel could personalize your visit in so many ways. What starts with dinner reservations could be converted into a memorable time, one that you may want to repeat and share with friends. But IT systems have to talk to each other before this scenario will be possible, and the hotel will need to leapfrog into the Age of Context by using mobile, social media, data, sensors and location technologies to know their customers and prospects well enough to personalize services and offers. What would motivate the Ritz to embark on a Pinpoint Marketing campaign such as this? They already have a highly regarded brand and have survived recent economic tough times unscathed.

Boeing Versus Airbus: The Inside Story of the Greatest International Competition in Business
by John Newhouse
Published 16 Jan 2007

Risk-averse Japanese suppliers do have a very good deal with Boeing, and they might be content to await a new cycle in technology, one that showed signs of moving industry toward a cost-effective supersonic airliner. “We have to decide whether to take a bigger part in engine development, or whether to leapfrog the current generation [of aircraft] and jump ahead to the supersonic technology, since the U.S. and the Europeans are ignoring this sector,” said one industry executive.16 Suppose that Boeing, for whatever reason, ended its privileged association with Japan. Would Airbus abandon one or more of its “centers of excellence” so as to acquire similar arrangements with Japan’s aircraft industry?

The Diamond Age
by Neal Stephenson
Published 2 May 2000

"Then I understood it all in an instant- pulled it up," he said, pantomiming the act of reeling in a fish. "The Celestial Kingdom was far behind Nippon and Atlantis in nanotech. The Fists could always have burned the barbarians' Feed lines, but this would only have plunged the peasants into poverty and made the people long for foreign goods. The decision was made to leapfrog the barbarian tribes by developing Seed technology. At first you pursued the project in cooperation with second-tier phyles like Israel, Armenia, and Greater Serbia, but they proved unreliable. Again and again your carefully cultivated networks were scattered by Protocol Enforcement. "But through these failures you made contact for the first time with CryptNet, whom you doubtless view as just another triad-a contemptible band of conspirators.

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance
by Eswar S. Prasad
Published 27 Sep 2021

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa
by Irene Yuan Sun
Published 16 Oct 2017

This is exemplified by the eight Millennium Development Goals spearheaded by the United Nations and championed by other global donors that put primary emphasis on measurable outcomes in health and education. And within Africa, there has been considerable buzz about the notion of leapfrogging—or as Forbes put it, “the promise that Africa, thanks to the rise of new technology and access to telecoms and internet, would rapidly reach a ‘tipping point’ that would dramatically accelerate development by enabling trade and entrepreneurship amongst its populations.”8 According to this theory, countries can leap from an agriculture-based economy directly to high-value-added services, bypassing the classic manufacturing-intensive stage of development.

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World
by David Sax
Published 15 Jan 2022

In a late 2019 report titled “How Ed-Tech Can Help Leapfrog Progress in Education,” the Brookings Institute warned, “If the education sector stays on its current trajectory, by 2030 half of all children and young people around the world will lack basic secondary-level skills needed to thrive. To change this dire prediction, we must make rapid, non-linear progress… leapfrogging.” Digital learning was a future worth pushing for, quickly. “At its best, technology can bring efficiencies, reach broader communities, and enhance learning needed to ensure all children and young people receive access to a high-quality, future-ready education.” A year and a half later, when my kids were sent home from school for the third time in the pandemic and resumed learning remotely, my friend Daniel Steinberg, whom I met in kindergarten, sent around a picture of an Archie comic from 1997, the year we were in twelfth grade.

Because We Say So
by Noam Chomsky

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism
by John Elkington
Published 6 Apr 2020

They include the following: •The rapid spread of artificial intelligence and algorithms is heralding new relationships between man and machine, spurred by neural interfaces used to augment our ability to control machines—with a huge impact on education via online learning. •The rest of the world is leapfrogging the United States because emerging economies are not locked in by obsolete infrastructures and technologies. •As a result, China will do to the United States what the United States did to Britain, taking over as the world’s dominant superpower. •Africa,6 accelerated by incoming Chinese investment, will emerge as the “next factory of the world.” •Agriculture will be transformed by new technologies, business models, and diets.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

That is because they are likely to turn into general-purpose technologies (GPTs) such as electricity and the internal combustion engine before them. The most powerful of these GPTs is likely to be artificial intelligence, or AI, according to economists such as Eric Brynjolfsson.59 Already, major tech companies from countries such as China are using AI applications to leapfrog the leading companies from the US. Companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, technology entrepreneur and investor Kai-Fu Lee told us, are rapidly catching up to American AI giants such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft and in some instances already have superior applications. They could help China develop and its people prosper.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

That is because they are likely to turn into general-purpose technologies (GPTs) such as electricity and the internal combustion engine before them. The most powerful of these GPTs is likely to be artificial intelligence, or AI, according to economists such as Eric Brynjolfsson.59 Already, major tech companies from countries such as China are using AI applications to leapfrog the leading companies from the US. Companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, technology entrepreneur and investor Kai-Fu Lee told us, are rapidly catching up to American AI giants such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft and in some instances already have superior applications. They could help China develop and its people prosper.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

The business process outsourcing (BPO) industry with its 1.3 million workers resorted to arguing that their operations belonged to the essential financial service industry and were thus exempt from the lockdown.16 Western clients, facing an avalanche of complaints about long wait times, were only too happy to endorse the claim. The possibility of leapfrogging into a new mode of remote living depended not just on technology and infrastructure, but also on hands-on manual labor. The social hierarchy made itself glaringly apparent. Whereas 75 percent of employees earning $200,000 or more in the United States were able to telework, for those earning less than $25,000, the share was as little as 11 percent.

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy
by Benjamin Barber
Published 20 Apr 2010

While perhaps best known as a site for the cheap-labor manufacture of Western apparel and shoes (workers make $700 a year), under B. J. Habibie, the German-trained minister for research and technology, Indonesia has also decided to pursue the high-tech end of McWorld. It already manufactures small commuter planes and helicopters, and is hoping to leapfrog other industrialized nations by stepping smartly into twenty-first-century high-technology domains. With its disparate multicultures, Indonesia is less worried about McWorld’s cultural values than about Western multicultural and democratic political ideals. Demography and topography favor fragmentation so that for Suharto the struggle is to hold the parts together by economic progress and military force.

Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System
by Chet Haase
Published 12 Aug 2021

They were the first to think about having Samsung sales reps in stores to help promote it, having little areas in the store. They did brilliant execution. “The technology and the phones caught up later to where the business and sales went. But really, it was led by this strategy of marketing and sales that allowed them to leapfrog, and then their devices got better and better and better.” Once the technology was there, they took on the smartphone market leader: Apple. “They did that brilliant marketing campaign of pitting them against the iPhone directly. They were kind of making fun of the iPhone, and people are like ‘Who’s this idiot company putting itself against the iPhone?’

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone
by Brian Merchant
Published 19 Jun 2017

It’s the same DNA. The same continuity.” And that’s an important point. Even the engineers who made it all possible know that they’re standing on the shoulders of giants or, as Bill Buxton would say, part of the long nose of innovation. The iPhone may have seemed like a new leapfrog invention, but not only were its creators relying on a spate of technologies developed for decades outside of Apple, they were seizing on and refining a legacy long built within its ranks. “Products like multitouch were incubated for many, many years,” Doll says. “Core Animation as well had been worked on for quite a while prior to the phone.

Energy: A Human History
by Richard Rhodes
Published 28 May 2018

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
by Matt Ridley

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern
by Jing Tsu
Published 18 Jan 2022

The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World
by Steve Levine
Published 5 Feb 2015

It was part of the narrative of industrial decline and the Japanese juggernaut that so consumed Americans. To fight back, American chipmakers proposed an experiment. They would band together along with the federal government and attempt to leapfrog the Japanese. In 1987, Ronald Reagan signed legislation that embraced the experiment. The law created Sematech, for Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology. Fourteen chipmakers and DARPA, a Pentagon research arm, went fifty-fifty on a five-year, $500 million effort to keep semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. American chip making surged back. Intel, led by Andrew Grove, regained dominance with first-rate, intricately designed microprocessors that captured the lucrative high end of the market.

Boundless: The Rise, Fall, and Escape of Carlos Ghosn
by Nick Kostov
Published 8 Aug 2022

Still, it was becoming clear to people at Nissan that Ghosn wasn’t as involved in the nitty-gritty details of car development. At the time, one of Nissan’s boldest projects, the Leaf electric car, was nearing completion. It was a gamble by Ghosn, intended to leapfrog over Toyota and take the lead in the automotive future. Toyota had been at the cutting edge of engine technology with its Prius hybrids, and Ghosn wanted Nissan to steal the thunder by jumping to fully electric vehicles, or EVs. Though odd looking, the Leaf was one of the most ambitious attempts to date to win people over to EVs, despite long-held concerns regarding battery range, high costs, and a lack of charging infrastructure.

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 10 Oct 2018

The game of regional or local monopoly has also been popular with banks, and arch-monopoliser Warren Buffett has made large sums playing this version of monopoly with local media organisations. ‘If you’ve got a good enough business, if you have a monopoly newspaper or if you have a network television station, your idiot nephew could run it,’ says Buffett. Take the leapfrog monopoly, where you innovate so fast or repackage an old business in new technology so well that flat-footed antitrust regulators can’t keep up. Many technology firms, and some private equity firms, specialise in this. Monopolies are contagious too. This is the case with defensive monopolies, where the only response to bigger players squeezing you out of your markets is to merge with others, to acquire the clout to be able to push back.

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 27 Sep 2011

A single solar panel now affixed on the tin roof of her hut provides enough electricity to not only charge the cell phone but also power four overhead electric lights.23 Although the statistics are still spotty, it appears that families across Africa are installing solar panels and analysts predict a quick scale-up as millions of others follow suit into the Third Industrial Revolution. What’s going on in Africa heralds a historic transformation as households leapfrog from the pre-electricity era directly into the TIR age. Besides solar, other green micro-generation energy technologies are quickly coming online, including small biogas chambers that make electricity and fuel from cow manure, tiny power plants that make electricity from rice husks and small hydroelectric dams that generate power from local streams. Still missing is a smart, distributed power grid that will allow stand-alone micro-generators to share electricity with others across entire regions.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

* * * — When a corporation automates insurance claims or adopts a new manufacturing technique, it creates efficiency savings or improves the product, boosting profits and attracting new customers. Once an innovation delivers a competitive advantage like this, everyone must either adopt it, leapfrog it, switch focus, or lose market share and eventually go bust. The attitude around this dynamic in technology businesses in particular is simple and ruthless: build the next generation of technology or be destroyed. No surprise, then, that corporations play such a large role in the coming wave. Tech is by far the biggest single category in the S&P 500, constituting 26 percent of the index.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
by David S. Landes
Published 14 Sep 1999

Brewer, John, and Roy Porter, eds. 1993. Consumption and the World of Goods. London: Routledge. Brezis, Elise. 1995. “Foreign Capital Flows in the Century of Britain’s Industrial Revolution,” Econ. Hist. Rev., 48, 1 (February): 46-67. —————, Paul R. Krugman, and Daniel Tsiddon. 1993. “Leapfrogging in International Competition: A Theory of Cycles in National Technological Leadership,” Amer. Econ. Rev., 83, 5 (December): 1211-19. Britannia Languens, or a Discourse of Trade (London, 1680), in McCulloch, ed., Early English Tracts, pp. 275-506. Broad, William J. 1995. “Watery Grave of the Azores to Yield Shipwrecked Riches,” New York Times, 6 June, p.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 5 Jun 2016

Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation
by Blake J. Harris
Published 12 May 2014

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914
by Richard J. Evans
Published 31 Aug 2016

Norway depended more on foreign capital, though it had a very large whaling and fishing fleet, but hydroelectric power resources grew here almost exponentially, doubling from 200,000 kilowatts in 1908 to 400,000 in 1912. In this way Italy, Sweden and Norway all leapfrogged the coal-based stages of industrialization and entered the industrial age on the basis of the most modern power technology. Other countries, such as Austria, despite its Alpine potential, found it difficult to follow suit, not least because of the inhibiting effect of the German economy: thus, for example, while German chemical companies could obtain sulphuric acid as a cheap by-product of the metallurgical industries, Austria, lacking modern industries of this kind, had to import it in the old-fashioned form of Spanish pyrites, at a much higher cost.