Innovation and Digital Divide

This post is divided in two... A "digital" divide. Alright, lousy joke, I admit :-)

But really, first my thoughts on innovation in regards to our professor Sudhanshu's new blog as Thomas mentioned, done on a Monday morning after a heavy weekend without any academic work except studying beers on the European Beer Festival in Valby, Copenhagen. Quite a lot of fun :-)

Next my input to the digital divide topic as Thomas has already talked briefly about. I better say something academic about it so it doesn't seem like Thomas is doing all the reading :-)

Well, innovation... My personal definition as of today would be: "Innovation is about walking new ways in old shoes, while improvising is taking the chance of walking new ways without shoes at all" - Thinking purely out of the box. I know there are multiple definitions of innovation and no right answer. Some would definitely say that innovation is also thinking out of the box but quite often I see what people call innovation is merely just new ways of thinking but with old traditional habits hanging on. I also acknowledge that with academic and scientific work and by putting new things alive you have to build your work on an existing foundation in some sense but habits can be a limiting factor of imagination. Our master thesis will definitely be a test of that. Our hope is to end up with some new conceptual ideas about application of ICT in the context of the illiterate population in developing countries but will we innovate or improvise? We have to build on some foundation (all the literature and stuff we are reading now and our empirical research data) but also improvise in some way I think. Our "young" bright minds and improvising skills must be tested :-)

I know my thoughts on innovation and improvising is taken from a different angle than our professor stated and plenty of other scholars would properly like to shoot me down now with arguments that I'm not discussing the two ideas in context, framing it properly and so on but that's the good thing about blogging. I can be subjective to the bone! :-)

To satisfy the objective (maybe more appropriate social constructivistic) thinkers here are the definitions from wikionary:

Innovate: "To do something for the first time; To introduce something new to a particular environment".

Improvise: "To make something up or invent it as one goes on; to proceed by guess rather than by a careful plan. To invent or create something quickly or without a plan; to wing it ".

Now you can make up your own mind about innovation and improvising :-)

Most of my readings the last week has been about the digital divide and the wider aspect of social exclusion. Digital divide is a very popular topic to discuss these days and maybe views exists. Some say it is the biggest challenge of mankind ever and some say it doesn't exist. Very short the digital divide is: "A gap in access, ability to use or gap of actual use or impact of use of ICT". I think I stand somewhere in between. In absolute terms it exists but relatively it is more diffuse. This is also the statement of one of the articles (Fink & Kenny, 2003) I've read recently.

In relative terms developing countries show faster rates of growth in network development than developed countries. This suggests that at present ICT growth rates, the developing countries have a good opportunity to leap-frog and catch up with developed countries, in absolute terms. The problem though can still be the benefits of ICT. Penetration might be high but productivity growth in accordance maybe lower because of agglomeration, front- and backroom activities etc. There is no digital divide but a digital opportunity.

This view is very interesting in conjunction to the more pessimistic literature in the field of digital divide. Now back to reading and tomorrow the NIAS conference.