The
Five Domains of Innovation
Public Policy
Governments must innovate in capital cities, in provinces and even local villages to alter market forces to make sure they serve the poor. All instruments of government: regulation, spectrum allocation taxation, legal factor and use of government budgets must be reimagined and remade in light of each nation’s digital economy.
Technology
Low income, remote locations need adequate electricity, infrastructure upgrades, cloud services and software that circulates data between government agencies, businesses and consumers. Supply-side and demand-side technologies must be aligned and integrated to enable “meaningful use” of internet.
Finance
Stakeholders in each nation must find a formula to share costs and risks of bringing the internet meaningfully to remote, empoverished locations. Market based investments must be aligned with government subsidies in a mixed, multistakeholder and interministrial approach to testing and deployment of meaningful broadband ecosystems.
Management
Management innovations must allow data on each user to circulate on a top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top basis. “Web services” and the skillful use of the cloud can make can become the driver of efforts to remake digital economies so that even low income, remote users can be uplifted by the internet. Each nation must find the right formula to align public and private management structures.
Ethics
To clarify what use of the internet is “meaningful” and what is not, stakeholders in each nation can draw upon ethnography, neuroscience, community informatics and other methodologies to create a “meaningful technologies index” that rate technologies on a scale indicates addiction (at one end of the scale) and “empowerment” (at the other end.)
