Embrace Innovations, African countries urged
By Lilian Museka
In a newly published paper policy and complex systems, the writer a Kenyan born professor Calestous Juma of the Havard Kennedy Schools Beifer Centre for Science and International affairs, calls on developing countries to adopt technical fields such as science, technology and engineering to catch up economically with developed countries.
He says this would transform economic systems to new levels of performance in all sectors and spread prosperity.
Prof. Juma's paper examines the impact of Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian-born Harvard scholar ranked among the world's most influential economists, whose 1911 book, The Theory of Economic Development, advanced the notion that innovation and individual entrepreneurship are the dynamic foundations of a nation's economic evolution, that "creative destruction" and the renewal of tools and processes within an economy continuously refreshes the system and results in rising prosperity.
His then ground-breaking ideas inspired innovation-led economic policies in industrialized countries but were dismissed as irrelevant to developing countries as policies and programs took shape within fledgling institutions in the 1950s such as the United Nations, World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
According to Prof. Juma, "pessimism" prevailed in early development economics, resulting in an emphasis on "the use of basic or 'appropriate technologies,' central planning, role of bureaucracies as sources of economic stability, and food aid" for developing nations, rather than innovation, entrepreneurship and industrial development.
Says Prof. Juma: "This view would lock emerging countries at the tail end of the product cycle, making them perpetual importers of foreign products with no capacity for technological learning."
Asian nations such as South Korea and Singapore that ignored the pessimists successfully adopted innovation-driven economic strategies.
Prof. Juma recommends developing nations to invest in transformational infrastructure projects that lay the foundation for economic development.
He also suggest building of technical capacity, especially in engineering fields, that is needed to drive growth through the translation of knowledge into goods and services, and also emphasizes the role of entrepreneurs and risk-taking in the private and public sectors as critical agents of innovation.
The strategy calls on governments to make African agricultural expansion central to decision making about infrastructure (energy, transportation, irrigation and telecommunications), technical education, entrepreneurship and regional economic integration.
Prof. Juma's paper is drawn from a book with the tentative title, How Economies Succeed: Innovation and the Wealth of Nations, publication of which is anticipated in 2016. His next book, Innovation and Its Enemies: Resistance to New Technology, is expected in 2015.
He is also preparing for release in 2015 an updated edition of his influential book, The New Harvest in which he proposes a route by which Africa could feed itself within a generation -- a clear prescription of innovative approaches for placing agriculture at the center of sub-Saharan Africa's economic transformation.
In a separate interview, the Prof called on the Kenyan government to review the national policy on development that will inturn influence school curricular.
“It will be useless to review the current school curricular if the national policy has not been reviewed,” he says.