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Technology and Innovation: Key quotesBoston was the setting for the Principal Voices event on Technology and Innovation on September 12, 2007, where our panel of experts discussed how information, knowledge and innovation were developing and radically transforming lives. Read an article about the event here. Following is a series of quotes from the participants. Jimmy Wales "The way we've always viewed our work in the developing world is it's not about 'here's something nice that some rich, white people have made for you.' They have to build their own language wikipedias; we can't do it for them. So it's about how do we build awareness, build capacity so that people there can share their knowledge and build resources that are valuable to them." "Lots of different people in lots of different places have a much more organic style of communication and collaboration in doing business. The example of the farmer who wants to get information about where the best places to go and sell his crops are, that has impact that might get rid of the need for certain firms that would be in the business of controlling access to that kind of information. But I think it's really hard to even really fathom the scale of change that direct peer-to-peer communication can have." "I think we have some really good answers to how do you avoid misallocation of resources. One is "bottom-up" rather than "top-down." It's really easy to do a mega-project and hand out a $100 per child in laptops when that's not at all what they really need. If it's coming from the grassroots and people are saying this is what we need and this is what we need to achieve, that is always a lot better." "As we move forwards, some of the things we're going to see in the media are some types of hybrid solutions emerging. In traditional media it will become more participatory in lots of interesting ways. I actually think that the most doomed is the sports journalist, simply because unlike most reporting sporting events are held at a time and place where it's very easy for the public to take part and passionate fans are very interested. Whereas reporting from war-zones is still very much the product of professional journalists with a whole infrastructure behind them." Kristin Peterson "Our innovation is to take the technology of today and make it available and useful so organisations that provide micro-finance loans, healthcare, education, can operate better and more effectively in rural places." "The more that we understand about what's happening in the world, the more it matters to us as individuals, and that's why I think more people are driven to get involved. The power of the revolution in technology is really driving this change." "Another big change in the projects we're doing is in schools. Many of the schools we work with don't have books, so having access to a computer with access to content locally and the Internet really opens up the world to them. It changes their perspective and also the teachers' ability to provide better training, because the teachers don't have access to materials for education. They can start working with the students to better educate them through the availability of the information that they can access." "Is there a danger to giving access to information, access to technology? We do get asked that question and I do find it very surprising. Who would deny anyone here access to a telephone? Yes, access to technology can change people's lives, but people should have a choice and be able to make that decision themselves." "We've taken a lot of the technologies that have ridden the cost curves and been proven today, but the innovation that needs to happen is to make all these technologies bullet-proof and much simpler to install and support. So you can deliver it and end-users with very little knowledge can maintain and operate these systems themselves. We still have a long way to go with this." "What we've found is the governments we work most closely with, such as in Uganda, are really embracing the ideas of information communications technologies (ICTs) and they are creating very progressive policies. In Rwanda they've taken off all tariffs from computers and peripherals. They have a vision of how technologies can improve their country's economic standing and making a lot of progress in building that into policies. They've opened doors for us and been very supportive." "When we start to connect communities and organizations, often what's most important is what's happening locally, so people want to know what's happening with the local news. We believe that once communities get access to the tools they're going to start building their own solutions and social networks." Neil Gershenfeld "We're winning the digital revolution, providing computation and communication, but we're reaching a point where we can begin to see success and the next digital revolution is in fabrication." "We've had a sea-change in aid from billion-dollar mega-projects to grass-roots entrepreneurs, but when you think about energy, communication or computing the means themselves are developed by heroes and institutions and sent out to the world. Increasingly the solutions can come from the bottom up." "Really the assumptions of scarcity that go into how we build advanced education and research make less and less sense. MIT isn't yet obsolete, but the boundary is moving very quickly and that's one of the most surprising implications of all this for me." "We're not brining invention, the invention is all around the world, and the one thing they miss is the means for invention. They understand the problems already, so we're bringing the tools. But again if you think about the division between aid, education, research and all that, nobody is on the job for providing the means for invention." "As these labs started to spread I started to wonder is this a good or bad thing? To be fair every piece of technology throughout history has been used for good and bad stuff. Good people and bad people do good and bad things; it's not just the technology. So as the labs spread I wondered, 'is this the appropriate thing to do?' And just the overwhelming response I got was that the most cultural imperialist thing to do would be to say: 'There, there dears, you go through the whole industrial revolution, then once you've done that you can come and talk to us.' Everyone we deal with wants to skip over all those stages, and the worst possible thing to do is for us to decide what's the most appropriate technology there." "I think what's interesting is to think what comes after the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. I strongly believe in a thin client; it's not the whole computer, but for $10 it assumes a network and for a few more dollars it uses a server. That's how I compute, I use the network and configure a server wherever they are. So the notion of one person equals one computer and one box, only makes sense if you don't have connectivity. Also there's notion that you don't have to develop them through AMD or Flextronics and send them out, but there's a different model where you can locally develop and produce them, they don't have to be all the same and the skills don't have to be the same, so you can have an ecology of computing. I think OLPC needed to happen to bring us to this point, but there's a chance to look at the next stage of computing, where it's not this monolithic thing you settle in front of in a room, but everything comes from the bottom up." Fabio Rosa "The governments are the power and I think when it comes to innovation you have to invite the government to be a partner, at a minimum. But the survival strategy is to think and to develop a road map where you can consider sometimes the government will be with you and sometime they will be outside of your project." "I think today that governments are not able to solve problems alone. The field where the social entrepreneurs work, mainly in the southern hemisphere, is just to solve the problems that the governments never solved." "When I started doing rural electrification in rural Brazil I was alone; that was in 1983. From then to when President Lula announced a national public policy on rural electrification it was twenty years. I haven't met anyone else like me who has been involved in the process for the last 20 years. So then the government was very important to me." |
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