Developing world biotech groups have come up with
innovative treatments for (among others) Hepatitis B,
Meningitis, Chagas Disease, and AIDS, with the research
sometimes based on local knowledge of indigenous plants and
traditional treatments. Some of the research is government
driven, but local entrepreneurism is an important part of
biotech innovation. This may present some difficulties down
the road; the rapid growth of the developing world
biomedicine industry is triggering some concern for health
activists such as Médecins Sans Frontières. This is not
because the drugs and treatments aren't useful -- they are,
critically so -- but because a number of these biotech
leapfrog nations are starting to adopt stricter patent
regimes, potentially restricting the ability to produce
cheap copies of new medicines produced elsewhere. A conflict
between the principles of
South-South
science transfer and the desire for WTO membership seems to
be on the horizon. It will be interesting to see if the
growing "open
source"
biotech
movement gains any ground in these nations.
The Economist piece is based on the
December issue of
Nature Biotechnology,
which surveys the state of health-related biotechnology
research in Brazil, China, Cuba, Egypt, India, South Africa
and South Korea. (PDFs of each of these articles are
available at no charge, although a multi-step free
subscription to the website is required.) Each article looks
at examples of recent health biotech developments, as well
as the lessons each state teaches to other developing
nations looking at local bioscience efforts. Nature's
overall conclusions are worth listing, because they apply to
leapfrogging efforts beyond biomedicine:
from solving important indigenous problems.
that the developing nation must follow paths established by
the developed states, or even by other developing nation
innovators.
local education systems are the heart of successful
innovation-based development.
Leapfrog 101
Jamais Cascio
WorldChanging.com
December 15, 2004
I've been asked twice in the last two days to give some
examples and explain the logic behind the "leapfrog"
concept. It occurs to me that many WorldChanging readers may
be wondering about what leapfrogging is, and why we talk
about it so much. Here's the argument:
"Leapfrogging" is the notion that areas which have
poorly-developed technology or economic bases can move
themselves forward rapidly through the adoption of modern
systems without going through intermediary steps.
We see this happening all around us: you don't need a
20th century industrial base to build a 21st century
bio/nano/information economy.
Rather than following the already-developed nations in
the same course of "progress," leapfrogging means that
developing regions can experiment with emerging tools,
models and ideas for building their societies. Leapfrogging
can happen accidentally (such as when the only systems
around for adoption are better than legacy systems
elsewhere), situationally (such as the adoption of
decentralized communication for a sprawling, rural
countryside), or intentionally (such as policies promoting
the installation of WiFi and free computers in poor urban
areas).
The best-known example of leapfrogging is the adoption of
mobile phones in the developing world. It's easier and
faster to put in cellular towers in rural and remote areas
than to put in land lines, and as a result, cellular use is
exploding. As we've noted,
mobile phone use already exceeds land line use in India,
and by 2007, 150 million out of the 200 million phone lines
there will be cellular. There are similar examples from all
over the world.
Examples of leapfrogging other than with mobile phones
abound. A few, pulled from the WorldChanging archives,
include:
Solar power for rural communities in Pakistan.
The "Hospital of the Future" in Thailand
World's Greenest Building, as voted by the US Green Building
Council, in Hyderabad, India
Free broadband and Linux machines in Brazil:
"Barefoot Solar Engineers" -- rural women trained to install
and repair solar power systems in India:
More examples can be found in the
Leapfrog Nations category, and we add pieces all the
time (I have another one on tap for later today).
Now, astute readers will notice a couple of things about
many of the leapfrog examples: most haven't yet led to
society-wide transformation (although it is happening
with mobile phones, and, in the case of Linux use, may be
happening soon in Brazil and China); and the "leapfrog"
technologies are largely those which don't require a
pre-existing grid -- solar power, mobile phones, wifi, etc..
The important thing to note is that the "leapfrog" isn't in
the specific technologies themselves (which are no better
than those in the West), but in the infrastructure,
the rapid growth of decentralized, ad-hoc, flexible
networks.
Mobile phone towers go up faster than stringing phone
lines, as noted, and there's no worry about upgrading legacy
analog switches. It's easier for Pakistan or India or
African nations to push for wide adoption of community solar
power than for most places in the West, since they don't
have to worry about integration with sprawling existing
power systems. Down the road a bit, it may be easier for
China to shift to fuel cell vehicles than in the West, as
they'll have a much smaller existing network of gas stations
that would need to be converted from gasoline/diesel to
hydrogen.
Leapfrogging is not a new concept. One of the first
academic articulations of the idea was in Alexander
Gerschenkron's 1962 essay, Economic Backwardness in
Historical Perspective. Unfortunately, the essay is not
currently available online; perhaps when Google is done with
its
new libraries project, it will be. In the meantime,
this review by Columbia University prof. Albert Fishlow
gives a detailed abstract of the argument.
Leapfrogging doesn't always work. There may be government
policies or lender mandates requiring the adoption of
certain infrastructure technologies which made sense a
decade or two ago, but are less useful now. There may be
resistance for reasons of tradition or marketing. And chosen
leapfrog technologies may simply not work well.
But leapfrogging is an important concept to keep in mind
when thinking about global development and the future of
emerging countries such as India, Brazil and China.
Developmental histories do not all follow the same path.
Technologies and ideas which seem somewhat powerful when
implemented in the West may be utterly transformative in
locations not laden down with legacies of past development.
The future belongs to those best able to change along with
it; sometimes, starting from nothing can be an engine for
just that sort of change.