The Democratization of Innovation

Abstract

Technological innovation is the transformation of a new idea or scientific discovery into standardized practice. The outcome is that people can progressively do more with the same effort, produce different outcomes with the same artifacts, and produce outcomes in new and novel ways. It was the main driver of global industrialization over the past two hundred years. Technology-based industrialization produced a regenerative industrial culture and marginalized lesser developed regions and countries in the process. Today some 85 percent of global wealth is owned by just 10 percent of the global population. One of the most serious threats to a sustainable world is global inequality in wealth and human competence. Impoverished people seem to find themselves in a low-level human developmental trap largely because of their inability to profit from technological innovation. The focus of this paper is on innovation management in less-developed, nonindustrialized, communities. Its central hypothesis is that endemic (human-centered) technological innovation rather than “technology transfer” (artifact-centered innovation) can help to alleviate entrenched poverty. It argues that effective application of technological artifacts is only possible with the support of a complex system of socioeconomic conditions (i.e., a supportive technology ecosystem). An outline for conceptualizing, planning, and managing innovation for human development is presented in the concluding sections of the paper.