The Economist has a 14 page section on Emerging Markets and points out the pace of business innovation.
A special report on innovation in emerging markets
The world turned upside down
First break all the rules
Easier said than done
Grow, grow, grow
Here be dragons
New masters of management
The power to disrupt
A special report on innovation in emerging markets
The world turned upside down
The emerging world, long a source of cheap labour, now rivals the rich countries for business innovation, says Adrian Wooldridge (interviewedhere)
Apr 15th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
IN 1980 American car executives were so shaken to find that Japan had replaced the United States as the world’s leading carmaker that they began to visit Japan to find out what was going on. How could the Japanese beat the Americans on both price and reliability? And how did they manage to produce new models so quickly? The visitors discovered that the answer was not industrial policy or state subsidies, as they had expected, but business innovation. The Japanese had invented a new system of making things that was quickly dubbed “lean manufacturing”.
This special report will argue that something comparable is now happening in the emerging world. Developing countries are becoming hotbeds of business innovation in much the same way as Japan did from the 1950s onwards. They are coming up with new products and services that are dramatically cheaper than their Western equivalents: $3,000 cars, $300 computers and $30 mobile phones that provide nationwide service for just 2 cents a minute. They are reinventing systems of production and distribution, and they are experimenting with entirely new business models. All the elements of modern business, from supply-chain management to recruitment and retention, are being rejigged or reinvented in one emerging market or another.
Coincidentally, a Microsoft friend who is based in China just introduced me to a clean energy entrepreneur in China. We had a quick conversation on the opportunities for data center innovation in emerging markets, and it got me thinking about the Economist articles more.
Here is the latest ClustrMaps showing the WW readership of GreenM3. The readership is significant in emerging market countries.
One of the other articles I liked is "First Break the Rules" To be innovative requires a willingness to break the rules. Which many times is a forbidden approach in enterprises. Consider the post I wrote on the Social Security Administration. An insider said, the SSA is evaluating hot and cold aisles, and is not convinced it will work. I don't expect to be doing any work with the SSA any time soon. :-)
First break all the rules
The charms of frugal innovation
Apr 15th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
GENERAL ELECTRIC’S health-care laboratory in Bangalore contains some of the company’s most sophisticated products—from giant body scanners that can accommodate the bulkiest American football players to state-of-the-art intensive-care units that can nurse the tiniest premature babies. But the device that has captured the heart of the centre’s boss, Ashish Shah, is much less fancy: a hand-held electrocardiogram (ECG) called the Mac 400.
The device is a masterpiece of simplification. The multiple buttons on conventional ECGs have been reduced to just four. The bulky printer has been replaced by one of those tiny gadgets used in portable ticket machines. The whole thing is small enough to fit into a small backpack and can run on batteries as well as on the mains. This miracle of compression sells for $800, instead of $2,000 for a conventional ECG, and has reduced the cost of an ECG test to just $1 per patient.
Can you imagine taking this same approach to data center systems?
I am looking forward to discuss what Emerging Market Data Centers should look like.