« Bush. Weed. Same thing really... | Main | My talk at the African Telecommunications conference »

February 27, 2005

More McLuhancy: 'Ground' penetrating radar & surf-skiing

I relooked at this reply to Renee Hopkins at Ideaflow the other day regarding a presentation on "Why Innovation" and realised it has resonance to the wider world, especially challenging Western-centric wisdom and models around the innovation argument within the developing world.

==="Innovation often comes as such a surprise, it can only be seen looking backwards."

Nothing is as zealous as a recent convert, so excuse my relatively recent discovery of McLuhan's work and being my current Maslow 'hammer'. (Actually it's your fault, thanks to your blog where I saw some comments by Mark Federman, which then got me absolutely fascinated :)

As I quote him on a posting on this issue of predicting the future,

"...When faced with a totally new situation we tend to attach ourselves to the objects ... of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future..."
Rear View Innovation

His point: we can best predict the future by probing the present, the essence of his medium is the message quote. But because we're so immersed in it (the 'ground' as he puts it), we don't see it. Only the figure.

The challenge then to the innovator is to develop 'ground penetrating radar'. Hah, just come up with that term now! To see what's going on now and to make sense of its trajectory is to put oneself ahead of the pack. I surf-ski paddle in the ocean, and to catch a swell, I have to be paddling before the swell/wave hits me, otherwise I lose the ride. I think the same goes for a business. If they are waiting for the wave, then paddle, no chance.

==="Why Innovation? … to Do Less and Have more!"

My feeling is that the developing world (of which SA is no exception) runs by a different, agrarian clock, hence the connectedness to seasonal thinking. It also may explain some of the North-South conflicts, however widely or narrowly you define that term ie. hemispheres, inter-country, intra-country (Italy, Germany, Spain).

The 'South' is more connected to the seasonal clock, and have a different worldview to their northern neighbours, who have relied on industrialisation to move on and develop, yet have lost the connection to nature (and a built-in systemic view). I'm still developing this line of thinking, so excuse its paucity of insight.

Anyway, my point: Taking Africa, we have loads of time ie. we have abundant labour resources. So the innovation challenge here is to increase productivity by using simple, appropriate technology (The Appro-Tech "moneymaker" in Kenya is a case in point. A hand powered waterpump that has allowed subsistence farmers to move into a producer category, and is alleged to be contributing to .5% of Kenya's GDP.) EF Schumacher wrote about the concept of appropriate tech. in "Small is Beautiful".

Our innovation goals: reduce poverty, reduce the burden (esp. on rural women), increase growth & development. In short....:"Do more with less."

From a speech I did in 2003 for a Mobile Telecoms conference here in Cape Town:

"In Africa, time is a different concept to in the West. Technologies developed there are geared towards saving time, to do the same thing in shorter, so that more time for leisure is available.

One of the amazing things about the Internet is the ability for it to reflect events in realtime.

In an African context, real time access isn’t a priority. Having access to content that is a day to a week old is infinitely more valuable to someone than not having it at all.

Thus the paradigm of needing to be “online” to the Internet for it to be relevant is challenged.

“Take-away” Internet can be a powerful tool in education, providing healthcare, collecting data.

Wizzy Digital Courier, one of the Cape IT Initiative’s Bandwidth Barn successes, delivers Internet content on a USB Flash disk via a courier system to schools, as well as downloading requested websites after hours when call rates are very low.

Combining existing distribution systems with web content demonstrates how powerful a perspective shift can be.

Another difference from the West: Here, we have loads of ‘time’; labour is abundant.

What we need are technologies that produce more with the same human effort. "

Posted by sdehaast at February 27, 2005 10:19 PM Posted to food for thought

Comments

Posted by: Mark Federman at May 27, 2005 7:41 PM