Communications - December 2012

serving the world’s
emerging markets
will require us to
“do new things
in new ways”:
the essence of
innovation.

requires further innovations, so diffusion and innovation are bound together in a process we should call “ innofusion.” What is needed are incremental alterations to the way the technology is configured, packaged, marketed, sold, used, supported, serviced, and so forth. And those alterations are context-spe-cific; attuned to the specific needs and expectations of each community. This is not mass production, it is mass customization. And it is rarely innovation of the core technology; more often innovation of the social processes that are essential to IT diffusion and use.

Reverse innovation

Some of these innofusion innovations make their way upstream in the value chain, and represent a small example of our final model: reverse innovation. Reverse innovation represents the mirror image of traditional concepts of innovation. Those traditional concepts see a flow of objects and ideas from the producer to the consumer; from the rich global North to the poor global South. Reverse innovation sees the opposite.

In 2012, development informatics researchers were amused to see British bank advertisements extolling the benefits of new services—such as PingIt—which would allow cellphone-to-cellphone transfer of money. In the U.K., we are used to measuring our technological lag to the U.S.: the time it takes for innovations to make it across the Atlantic. Now it seems the Mediterranean is the new crossing point: Kenyans, for example, have had mobile money transfer services since 2007. Thanks to the new innovation models, Africa is five years ahead of Europe, and the idea of m-money has flowed from poor countries to rich countries.

More prosaically, Cisco’s ASR901 routers were developed for the needs of service providers in emerging Asian markets, but then backflowed to U.S. and European clients. Their low-cost and energy-efficient designs arose from developing-country realities, but offered a competitive advantage also in more mature markets.

at the same time—will require us to “do new things in new ways”: the essence of innovation. More than that, it will require us to do innovation in new ways if we are to develop the new hardware and applications to achieve those goals.

For that to happen, we need a new mind-set. One that sees the world’s poor not in terms of the remote, helpless images often used by development charities, but through more positive and active images that understand them at least as IT consumers and perhaps, further, as agents in their own development.

For IT multinationals, universities, and innovators in North America and Europe, this change in mind-set may be particularly difficult given legacy attitudes toward the “Third World.” There are already signs that IT firms in China and India are more adept at working with innovation intermediaries and at frugal innovation. Absent more change in the global North, it may be these mid-income nations that capture the next technological frontier that the bottom of the pyramid represents.

ACM’s interactions magazine explores critical relationships between experiences, people, and technology, showcasing emerging innovations and industry leaders from around the world across important applications of design thinking and the broadening field of interaction design. Our readers represent a growing community of practice that is of increasing and vital global importance.

References

1. Best, m. and Kumar, R. Sustainability failures of rural telecentres. Information Technologies and International Development 4 (2008), 31–45.

2. gSmA. African mobile Observatory, gSmA, London, 2011.

3. Heeks, R. Information systems and developing countries: Failure, success and improvisation. The Information Society 18 (2002), 101–112.

4. Severin, E. et al. Evaluation of the “Una Laptop Por Niño” Program in Peru. IAdB, Washington, d.C., 2011.

conclusion Innovation is a term so overused it can start to lose its meaning. But serving the world’s emerging markets—and perhaps lifting millions out of poverty

Richard heeks ( richard.heeks@manchester.ac.uk) is the director of the Centre for development Informatics at the University of manchester, U.K.; http://www.cdi.manchester. ac.uk.