Silicon Hutong

Dissecting the National People's Congress: The PLA and Independent Innovation

In the Hutong

Looking for the burnout cream

1641 hrs

Even the most focused minds and incisive bladders must collapse under the weight of a 15,000 word address, and apart from our hyperlinked and multitasked MTV attention-spans, we in the West lack the tolerance for protracted oratory. We think, my Lord, if Lincoln could move a nation with 272 words in the Gettysburg address, what possible good could come of much more?

By now, China's leaders know this, and I've developed a theory that they intentionally structure their speeches to hide the good stuff in the back half. So when I got the text of Wen Jiabao's 2009 Report on the Work of the Government (i.e., The State of the Nation with Chinese Characteristics) I went straight to the back.

And I was not disappointed.

The Army's Buried Lede

Hidden there, not far from the end, was an interesting little piece that grew in significance over the past week.

"In the coming year, we need to make our army more revolutionary, modern and standardized, focusing on enabling it to fully carry out its historic missions in the new stage and in the new century. We will strengthen ideological and political work in the army. We will effectively transform our military training based on mechanized warfare to military training for warfare under conditions of greater IT application, and continue to enhance the army's ability to respond to multiple security threats and accomplish a diverse array of military tasks. We will modernize weapons, equipment and logistics support across the board. We will improve defense-related research, the weapons and equipment production system, the military personnel training system, and the army's logistics support system that integrate civilian with military purposes and combine military efforts with civilian support."

[Emphasis mine]

There are two points of interest in this brief but important paragraph that are worth noting which, when related, speak to the future of China's technology industries.

Information Warfare by Any Other Name

First is China's plan bring the PLA into the 21st century, easing the emphasis on mechanized forces that has guided global military thinking for the past 90 years, shifting instead to an approach with a greater emphasis on information technology. The details of what exactly this means is unclear. There are few aspects of modern warfare that are not suffused with chips and networks, and "greater IT application" can mean anything from computers in tanks, to the ability to disrupt the information infrastructure of other militaries and nations, to the emerging concept of "network-centric warfare."

I'm betting that China will dive into all of the above.

Mind you, the change will not happen overnight. Even if it seeks to leapfrog the U.S. and other military powers, the PLA like most armies is led by men and women who think of war in terms of infantry assaults, tank battles, and missile attacks. These folks will not be anxious to surrender the more visible (and intimidating) proofs of military strength: after all, armies (and navies, and air forces, and space forces) will always need to bear a nation's credible threat of physical destruction.

Premier Wen's statements are, however, a clear message to the leaders of the PLA that while they will get upgraded toys in the near term, the PLA's destiny is to become a force capable of winning battles without firing a shot.

Getting to the PLA of Tomorrow

The implications for China's technology industry should be obvious in that first bolded sentence, but that's not enough for Wen. Two sentences later he hints further at his vision for a new Chinese military industrial-complex, noting that defense related R&D, manufacturing, and "the integration of military and civilian purposes" are also at the core of China's vision for its military.

Now, I emphasized that last bit because by itself this is an important policy statement, but in combination with the IT-led direction of China's military, it points to more than just military procurement policy but the future of China's technology industries.

Bear with me.

When it comes to modernizing the PLA, China has a choice of developing its own technology or buying from others. That choice is going to go away. In most cases, China will be largely left with having to develop its own.

First, the number of nations willing to sell military technology to China will decline, with countries ratcheting back sales either because they see China as a rival in the defense business (Russia, maybe France), they see China as a potential threat to themselves or an ally (United States, Japan, India), because Washington doesn't want them to (Germany, Britain, and Israel), or because they don't have anything to offer Beijing (most of everyone else.)

Second, the Central Military Commission (China's combined equivalent of America's Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council) will be unwilling to leave control over critical national defense systems in the hands of foreign nations or foreign companies. This is understandable: the United States, Russia, and a dozen other countries operate under the same principles.

Third, some intelligent and opportunistic policy makers in Beijing will realize that if the country invests in developing its own technologies, the entire exercise strengthens the country's civilian commercial sector. And this is where Wen's throwaway comment about "the integration of military and civilian purposes" gets interesting.

It is no secret that the United States' much-vaunted technology industries were founded on innovations that came from projects funded by the Department of Defense. In effect, America's aviation, aerospace, computer, electronics, software, wireless communications, and the Internet sectors owe much of their global success to the breakthroughs and profits brought by defense contracts.

By all indications, the Premier seems to be pointing China in a direction where it, too, will pursue defense spending with a twin agenda - a more secure China, and a technology industry heavily fertilized with profitable defense projects. And China would not only be wise to follow America's lead, they would be within their rights - the WTO makes wide provision for protectionist practices in industries deemed vital to national security and defense.

The World is Theirs

There is a qualitative difference between dumping a lot of money onto Chinese tech researchers and imploring them to go forth and innovate, versus giving them a contract to fix a specific problem or develop a specific system. At the very least you get a product out the back end. If you are lucky, you get something that works for the military, and if you are really lucky, you wind up with a development that has huge civilian potential.

Just one example of many: Boeing's entire commercial jet airliner business owes its existence to a set of technologies created to build the largely-forgotten B-47 bomber. That one project begat the prototype for the Boeing 707, which begat the hugely popular 727 and 737, and the rest is history.

It is easy to see how the path from a few high-tech defense projects to the creation of global tech powerhouses may not be a smooth one for China. But one only need look at companies like Huawei to appreciate that the more robust China's defense industries become, the more of these sorts of international competitors will emerge from the murk of military work with competitive - and perhaps innovative - products.

Caveat Inventor

I have said elsewhere that China will try to forge its own path as it seeks to create an economy based on innovation. I expect that part of that model will involve the peaceful application of technologies created for the purpose of national defense.

But I also know that I would be naive if I believed that China would steadfastly insist on creating its own military innovations when it would be easier, faster, and cheaper to "borrow" those created elsewhere. The pressure for results and the urgency of the goal will cause many companies to take what could be politely called "R&D shortcuts." This is to be expected - history has proven that an uptick in industrial espionage is a natural side-effect of the emergence of a new world power, particularly in the case of one still wrestling with the concept of intellectual property rights.

An pound of prevention is in order. Those companies with technology to protect would be doing themselves - and ultimately China - a great service by recognizing the potential for industrial espionage and taking aggressive measures. You get to keep your technology, and China enjoys the deeper benefits of doing the basic spadework that genuine independent innovation would require.

Another Tech Iconoclast

Starbucks Pinnacle Plaza, Houshayu Village

Ahh, spring

1025 hrs.

Many of us non-Chinese (and a healthy percentage of Chinese returning from abroad) indulge ourselves with the conceit that we are somehow helping to build a bridge (or, really, many bridges) between China and the rest of the world. And to be fair, some of us are doing a better job than others.

For his part, Ken Carroll of Chinesepod has discovered a new and brilliant way to do so, and Patti Waldmeir of the Financial Times does a profile on Ken and his work that I found inspiring on this chilly early spring morning in Beijing.

Innovation doesn't just happen in labs, and it doesn't always need mountains of capital or government edict.

Just a good idea, strong execution, and a little word of mouth.

The ARJ-21 and China's Long, Slow Climb to the Skies

In the Hutong

No place else I'd rather be

1158 hrs.

Covering this year's Zhuhai Air Show, The Economist takes a look at China's first domestically-produced jetliner, the AVIC1 Commercial Aircraft Corporation's ARJ-21, and on the eve of the regional jet's maiden test flight takes a moment to consider its commercial prospects. Their verdict: don't count China out.

Many foreign analysts doubt that Western airlines will ever be prepared to buy Chinese aircraft. But, as in other fields, China is playing a long game.

Much of the debate about the ARJ-21 thus far has centered around two issues: first, whether the ARJ-21 will attract buyers beyond the Chinese airlines who are compelled to purchase it (and GE, who is making a pile selling engines for the jet); and second, whether China will ever develop a globally competitive civil aviation industry.

Both questions miss the point. What is most important about the ARJ-21 is the lessons it teaches us about the process China goes through to catch up with the rest of the world in technical, complex, high-value industries.

Watch Process, not Product

If you look at all of the technical sectors in which China has built commercially viable businesses, you can discern a clear process by which the nation's industrial policy kick-starts these efforts. In the case of cars, computers, mobile phones, and now commercial jetliners, the pattern is dependably consistent. Let's call it the Four C Model.

First, comes what I call the "capability" phase. the government typically announces a national project to build its own version of an technical product. It turns to a government research institute or a similar organization, which in turn pulls together the team from across the nation's universities and enterprises. Eventually they manage to produce a one or more prototypes, but there is no real possibility of commercializing the product.

Upon review of the initial prototypes and the development process, typically a range of issues is identified that prevented the commercialization of the product. As a result, during the next "collaborate" phase, China sets up an enterprise to build the product using foreign designs, components, and know-how. The result is not quite commercially viable, and may only sell to local customers because of tariffs, tax-breaks, or other subsidies that make the local product appealing to local customers.

Next comes the "component" phase, when a local company creates its own design or modifies another, and many of the parts, but key, mission-critical components come from overseas. In this phase the product is adequate and by most measures comparable to foreign products, but with no track record only the most adventurous foreign customers are ready to trust the product.

Finally, all of the technical kinks are worked out, there are several Chinese companies involved in the effort, and with a demonstrable track record behind it, China is ready to go head-to-head with global companies. This is the "competitor" phase, and it usually marked by brisk sales and the beginnings of a true competitive advantage.

Not Quite a Competitor

In the case of the ARJ, China's effort to build its own jetliner has reached the "component" phase, and it has taken 35 years to get this far.

In the early 1970s, China began a project to prove to the world it was capable of making its own jetliner. the result was the now almost-forgotten Shanghai Y-10, which was as close to a clone of the Boeing 707 that the nation could produce in the late 1970s. Two prototypes were produced. They flew in the early 1980s. China made its point. And the jets never saw commercial service: they were essentially flying monuments to China's aspirations. This was the "capability" phase.

Not long after, China got involved in negotiations with McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft for a joint-venture to assemble their MD-80 class jets in Shanghai. The JV went through brutal political turbulence and costly delays, and in the end the venture sold only a fraction of the jets it had hoped. McDonnell-Douglas was sent packing, but China was left with an entire generation of aircraft engineers, a lot of very helpful tooling, and the groundwork to take the next step. Thus ended the "collaborate" phase.

After nearly a decade of thinking, planning, proposals, and counter-proposals, and even another shot at collaborating with other Asian aspirants, China launched the ARJ-21 (Asian Regional Jet - 21st Century) project. This is the "component" phase, and at this point China is serving as re-designer (the jet is basically a shortened MD-80, or DC-9, with a new wing design from Russia), project manager, and system integrator.

Tough Room

China's aviation policy-makers and industrialists knew the ARJ-21 would be playing in the most competitive end of the civil aviation pool. The regional jet field is dominated by Canada's Bombardier, with its CRJ series, and Brazil's EMBRAER, with its ERJ series, both of whom have complete lines of aircraft, global technical support, and who built their business on solid reputations for making dependable aircraft.

Three very old names in the aviation industry, British Aerospace, Dornier, and Fairchild, have already been driven out of the aircraft manufacturing business after losing out to Bombardier and EMBRAER, and Boeing's 717 was squeezed out of its market niche with a plane strikingly similar to the ARJ-21. Four other very old names in the aviation industry, Antonov, Tupolev, Sukhoi, and Mitsubishi are all getting ready to pounce on the ARJ-21's markets with brand new regional jets of their own.

So there is not much hope for the ARJ-21 beyond China. And prospects inside of China are not that great, either.

Fat Planes Wanted

The idea behind a regional jet is that you have flights under two hours duration connecting cities under 1,800 kilometers or 1,100 miles apart where you cannot economically fill, say, a Boeing 737, or where the field might be a little short for a small jetliner.

In China, however, the problem is that we have a limited number of airports, a limited amount of airspace, and a whole lot of people who want to fly. There will be some market for regional jets, but in the medium to long term China needs larger jets that make the best possible use of the limited resources in Chinese aviation (i.e., concrete and airspace) to move the maximum number of passengers at the lowest possible cost.

Finally, let's not forget that perhaps the most serious competitor to regional jets in China doesn't even fly. China is in the early phases of a madness for high-speed intercity rail transport. The threat posed by trains as fast as Japan's Shinkansen and France's TGV is most serious to the shorter air routes served by the ARJ. As the price of jet fuel goes up (and, despite current trends, it surely will), that threat grows all the more critical.

Back to our Model

There are other issues, such as a total cost of ownership for the ARJ-21s that are going to be higher than carriers are being let to expect. With all factors in consideration, the ARJ-21 faces some roaring headwinds.

But again, what is important is not the plane itself, but where China's jetliner manufacturing industry will be after the ARJ-21. And here is where it starts to get really interesting.

Just as the ARJ-21 goes into full production, Airbus will be completing its A320 assembly plant in Tianjin. Between the two, China will for the first time have two factories cranking out airliners. The benefits to the industry will be enormous. China will have created overnight a workforce of engineers, machinists, and all of the other specialties involved in aircraft assembly.

In short, by 2014, the groundwork will be in place for China to make the next jump, and the ARJ-21 team will have had five years learning what it takes to support an airliner in the field, sometimes even in the most challenging locations.

What is more, right about that time, Boeing and Airbus will be under pressure from their customers around the world to develop successors to their single-aisle jetliners in the 110-170 passenger range. Both have made it so far by updating and extending their 737 and A320 lines. Five years from now, that may not be enough.

At that point, the door will open for China to enter the fray with its own design, and they will have the benefit of being able to work with the world of suppliers and subcontractors - both in China and overseas - that Boeing and Airbus have helped create. And with Boeing and Airbus forced to contend with powerful unions determined to secure for their members a comfortable American or European middle-class lifestyle, China may well offer a nice cost advantage as well.

All things being equal, then, China may well be able to compete in the small airliner market by 2020.

A Lesson, not a Product

Again, though, this makes the ARJ-21 a stepping-stone, not the destination itself. As such, the success or failure of the ARJ-21 project cannot be measured solely on the basis of aircraft sold. Rather, it must be judged on its by-products, on the extent to which it prepares the nation's aerospace industry to take the next, all-important step and become a global competitor.

Searching for China's Soul of innovation

In the Hutong

Peace through superior keyboards

1702 hrs.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, thoughtful people are starting to think about what the U.S. is going to use as a growth engine, now that housing, stock markets, and arcane financial instruments are out as alternatives. It did not take long in these discussions for some bright people to suggest that America needs to innovate its way back to greatness.

Yankee Ingenuity, Jia You!

Leaving aside for a moment that innovation and creativity in finance got the United States - and the world - into this problem in the first place, betting the future of any nation on its collective ability to come up with a whole lot of "new and useful" things in the space of an economic cycle seems to be a bit of a Hail Mary play. Industrial policy, regardless of how light or heavy the hand that applies it, has never been all that useful as a driver of innovation. Even corporations that spend billions on research and development wind up with very few useful innovations (look at the pharmaceutical industry), and many companies fail to capitalize on those they get as a result, for a myriad of reasons. (The case of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and the graphical computer user interface is one notable example.)

There is simply too much serendipity in the innovative process to foment it efficiently. Even when you put really smart and creative people together with the facilities they need to innovate, the entire effort devolves into a numbers game. Throw enough brains together for long enough, the thinking goes, and something good is bound to come out of it all.

What America has going for it, of course, is momentum. Coming off of a national tradition for invention that began with Benjamin Franklin and Eli Whitney, somewhere just before World War II American inventiveness reached critical mass - literally and figuratively. Simultaneous discoveries and inventions across fields like physics, chemistry, aerospace, and electronics met mass production, marketing, mass prosperity and Keynesian economics. The resulting boom has carried the U.S. for seven decades - why should it not continue?

Sure, the government may be dysfunctional, Wall Street shell-shocked, and consumers in hock to their hairlines, but by gum, Americans still know how to come up with new stuff, make it cheap, and market the heck out of it. There's hope for the Yanks yet.

Waiting for China to Start Innovating Again

The unspoken assumption here is that nobody else is anywhere near as good at that stuff than the Americans. Which is part of the reason the words "Chinese innovation" scares Americans.

It would be unfair to forget that a lot of companies hear those very words and think "in China, innovation is really imitation." There is plenty of truth in that, and that thinking keeps a lot of intellectual property attorneys and trade negotiators well fed, clothed, and housed.

But the real pachyderm on the porch, the question that so many in the innovative industries will not allow themselves to ask, is "what if Chinese companies got it together and started to innovate? Then what?"

Questions like this are part of what is driving a wider audience to learn more about the life and work of Dr. Joseph Needham. A Cambridge master and biochemist, Needham spent much of his life and career compiling a history of Chinese science. He was an avowed sinophile, and as such much of his effort centered around an effort to prove that China before the Qing dynasty was the cradle of many of the world's major innovations up to that time.

The underlying theme of his work was to disprove the chauvinistic hypothesis that Chinese as a race were capable of imitation but not innovation. In the main, he documented and catalogued Chinese innovations in an effort to demonstrate that the West - and the Industrial Revolution it birthed in the 19th Century - owed a massive debt to Chinese innovations.

(The Chinese innovation I heard about all the time when growing up was a metallurgical technique called the Lost Wax process of investment casting. My father's foundry in California used that process in the 1960s and 1970s to make parts for turbochargers, airliners, golf clubs and medical implants. He was as proud of the heritage of the system as he was of its results. "Gee, Dave how do you make such amazing products?" "Ancient Chinese secret," he said with an enigmatic smile. But we digress.)

The real pity about Needham's work is that he spent so much time focused on what the Chinese invented and when they invented it that he had no time to figure out why the Chinese were such prolific innovators when they were, and how things changed to make that stop. This may have been because Needham was a monomaniac, or simply because he wasn't a trained historian. Either way, it leaves us with proof that the Chinese can be great inventors, but without the historic perspective on what it will take to revive that latent spirit.

Innovation with Chinese Characteristics

Yet he points us in a compelling direction. So much of what is written about China and innovation today, whether by foreign or Chinese observers, is patronizingly prescriptive. If China wants to innovate, it must imitate - it must recreate the conditions that exist in high-tech hothouses of Silicon Valley, Boston's Route 128 corridor, Austin, and Seattle. There is some truth in that, but there seems something unnatural about trying to graft San Jose onto Shanghai, or Federal Way onto Tianjin.

Needham's work, on the other hand, hints at another road to an innovative future, one that is Chinese in origin, not Western. Perhaps the answer for China is to search for an answer to the independent innovation challenge in its own history, applying foreign lessons where appropriate.

What was it about those times that fostered innovation? Was it cultural? Was it economic? Was it political? Was it invasion or civil war that fed China's inventiveness, or was it the luxury of peace and prosperity? Was the assimilation of some foreign culture the spark that set off periods of creative flowering, or did cultural homogeneity drive it?

These questions, and others like them, are the markers that will take us the next mile down the road that Joseph Needham walked, and will likely give us a better idea of when and how China will challenge America for innovation leadership.

In the meantime, I'm betting on Silicon Valley for green technology innovations, not China. But that's another post.

Cough Cough, Bang Bang

Starbucks Pacific Century Plaza

Noticeably fewer locals, noticeably more visitors

1355 hrs.

Recreational pyrotechnics are as integral a part of Chinese holidays as gratuitous gifting, constant partying, and excessive drinking. Catastrophic factory accidents and an annual toll of those killed and wounded by fireworks have driven the government to occasional fits of regulation. Each time, however, regulators back off, responding either to a general backlash or to implicit pressure from the massive cottage industry that has grown up around fireworks in China.

Officials now have another reason to rethink fireworks: air quality.

Oooh, Pretty colors...(wheeze)...

In a July 4th article in the Los Angeles Times, Marla Cone notes:

Scientists in India found that airborne barium increased by a factor of 1,000 after a huge fireworks

display there. Strontium, which creates red, and copper, which forms a blue hue, can also be toxic.

"The use of heavy metals like barium or strontium should be reduced or, if possible, avoided," said

Karina Tarantik, a chemist at the University of Munich in Germany whose lab is working on cleaner

pyrotechnics.

Much of the new research has been propelled by concern over perchlorate, which has been used since

the 1930s to provide oxygen for pyrotechnic explosions.

Perchlorate, which has contaminated many drinking water supplies from military and aerospace

operations, can impair the function of the thyroid gland by blocking the intake of iodide. Fetuses are

most at risk, because thyroid hormones regulate their growth.

Because of legal restrictions on the sale and use of fireworks - not to mention some understandable paranoia about wildfires - Los Angeles on July 4 cannot compare with any Chinese city on a national holiday. Nonetheless, the Southern California Air Quality Management District (AQMD) notes that on July 4 particulate levels in L.A. increase 100-fold and do not return to normal levels for nearly 24 hours.

One wonders what a similar measurement would render in Chinese cities, especially in the winter months when weather seems to trap particulates in a layer near the ground.

A Technology Solution

The article explains how one heavy user of fireworks, Disneyland, has turned to the Los Alamos National Laboratory for help in developing cleaner fireworks. With some experimentation, the lead materials chemists took an "entrepreneurial leave" from the lab to found DMD Systems and produce the cleaner fireworks. Voila. Cleaner fireworks for about the same cost as other US-made fireworks.

Of course, these are much more expensive than the Chinese-made types, which are well on their way to being branded "dirty" fireworks.

The entire issue points up another opportunity for China's domestic innovation efforts. If a tiny US company can come up with fireworks that produce mostly water, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide, there is no reason that China cannot turn its efforts to finding a substitute for its gunpowder-based pyrotechnics. I would bet that a determined effort could do better than DMD Systems.

That would help preserve a robust export industry (98% of consumer fireworks and 80% of professional fireworks used in the US are made in China), but it would also head off the growing issue of fireworks and air pollution in China. Yes, I know, there is an emotional attachment to using gunpowder because, after all, that was a Chinese invention.

But it is time for China to re-invent gunpowder. A billion sets of lungs depend on it.

Cross-post: Design that sells, please

"China Needs Design that Sells: As the country changes from a manufacturer to a consumer nation, companies must learn how to market to a diverse public" By Patrick Whitney, BusinessWeek, April 25, 2006

Professor Whitney from the Illinois Institute of Technology makes some superb points in this op/ed piece. Among them he notes that companies have to stop thinking about China as a single market; and that standard tools of market research don't cut it.

Right on, Dr. Whitney.

BTW, Whitney is the Steelcase/Robert C. Pew Professor and the director of the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech. Here's a guy who is not even focused on China, and he gets it.

Originally Posted 7 May 2006

Cross-post: Aging Population and Independent Innovation

Back in the Hutong 
Installing another Security Update 
1738 hrs.

AP is reporting that PRC's rapidly aging population is going to end China's role as a source of low cost labor "within the next few decades."

Which, of course, is part of why China's leaders are pushing the economy to evolve beyond being the hands and feet of the global economy. China started reforming and opening as one of the youngest countries in the world: by the time we all start to retire, it will be one of the oldest.

The good news for China is that it has a little time, and that it will have the opportunity to watch Western Europe, Japan, and the United States deal with the same problem first. The difference for China: somehow I don't think immigration will solve the problem.

Gruaduate Level Bloggers: Stephen DeAngelis and the Guys on the Other Side of the Hill

Enterprise Resilience Management Blog, Stephen F. DeAngelis, Principal, Enterra Solutions

Stephen DeAngelis is an extraordinarily bright guy, working as he does with some very interesting clients to help figure out how to use well thought-out, well-packaged economic development as the principal weapon in the war on terrorism. Stephen is dedicated to making the world (and, more important, our policymakers) understand that the only way to end the river of homicide bombers is to give them all a better future to live for.

His blog posts read like lectures - not in the sense of them being esoteric and pedantic, but in terms of being so filled with insight that you want kill all the lights in the room, close the blinds, and turn off your iTunes just so DeAngelis' words go straight into your cortex. DeAngelis one more proof of the value of reading some of the better blogs out there.

Stephen has inspired me to create a list of what I will call "Graduate Level Bloggers," people who write blogs that are themselves like master classes. Read them and forget about having to go back and get your degree from Hopkins. You'll get more staying in your current job and reading these guys - and what they read.

Ind-ja!

Stephen has written an excellent post comparing and contrasting articles from recent editions of The Economist (subscription required) and BusinessWeek on the challenges India faces competing with it's trans-Himalayan neighbor and rival.

Despite a lot of sunshine that pundits have been pumping out about the sub-continent lately, the ugly truth is that India's leaders are having a hard time mustering the political cojones required to make the unpopular trade-offs that will buy India her future. Now, to an extent, I can't criticize, especially when America's leaders - in both the White House and on Capitol Hill, similarly lack the testicular fortitude to risk their own political careers in the name of vision.

America, however, does not face the same kind of challenges that India does.

We should all be rooting for India. If she succeeds in addressing the challenges that face her, it would give deep credibility to the argument that democracy can bring underdeveloped countries - and their peoples - out of destitution and into global-level prosperity.

If she fails, however, or becomes a laggard in a dynamic region, she will only give more credibility to those who say that only authoritarian regimes can assemble the necessary preconditions of national wealth.

Originally posted 27 March 2007

Cross-post: The Next 4 Game-Changing Mobile Technologies

Edwards, Cliff and Moon Ihlwan, "Upward Mobility: Ultrafast networks and whizzy features are about to turn your cellphone into - well, your right arm," BusinessWeek, December 4, 2006

I always worry about technology when I read about it in BusinessWeek, because I feel like this is one of those signals that a given innovation has hit its apogee on the hype meter.

In this case, however, I give the two authors credit for isolating four potential technologies that look set to significantly extend the number of things for which you can use a mobile phone. Well worth a read.

Dumping all of these cool features into a phone might sound like a good business plan to The Boys in Espoo, but frankly, I'd be happy if the big manufacturers could come up with user interfaces that actually made the features already on the phones more usable.

Originally posted 21 January 2007