Archive for February, 2010

Okay, this really annoys me:

[Debates about foreign aid] have largely been the province of Western intellectuals and economists, with Africans in the developing world being passive objects in the exercise — just as the 1980s debate over the United States’ Japan fixation, and the consequent Japan bashing, occurred among Americans while the Japanese themselves stood by silently. Yet now the African silence has been broken by Dambisa Moyo, a young Zambian-born economist with impeccable credentials. [Emphasis added.]

That’s the well-respected and influential development economist Jagdish Bhagwati writing in Foreign Affairs. The article is a review of Dambisa Moyo’s book from last year, Dead Aid, and does a fine job of covering the history of foreign aid, but that assumption, that Africans have been “passive objects” in the debates surrounding development, charity and foreign aid is absolutely absurd.

I don’t claim to be a great Africanist – my time on the continent is limited to a few months, but that alone is enough to know that Africans are not the narrow-minded, unaware objects of a debate carried out only in Western marble-lined hallways. From African intellectuals, of which there are many, to middle-class students, the Africans I know have nuanced, defensible views and opinions on the issues about which Professor Bhagwati gets paid to write and teach.

The views of these Africans didn’t just pop-up liked daisies when Ms. Moyo published her book; they’ve been there for decades. The problem, I fear, is that it took a Westernized, PR-savvy Zambian woman to shake the Bhagwatis and Sachs of the world into paying attention. It also couldn’t hurt that she’s very pretty, right?

If this seems like a small point, and, I dunno, maybe it is, consider it a good excuse to listen to the great Senegalese musician Youssou N’Dour and his song, Wake Up, which makes similar points.

Thanks largely to a course on infrastructure studies, my thinking about the role of technology in society has evolved greatly in 2010. I used to be convinced that digital technologies were just tools, capable of good or bad uses. Now, I’m more likely to find that they do exert some sort of pressure towards society, but that the ultimate effect is still a result of mixing with larger societal forces (see domestication theory).

These are issues that are receiving a lot of attention – Jaron Lanier is getting big-time media attention for saying that the Internet is taking us all to hell in a hand-basket in his new book, You Are Not a Gadget, the public is being led to ask questions about the effect of Google and the Internet on cognition, etc. But what is missing, in my opinion, from these discussions are the productive ways in which willing individuals can use specific technologies to change the supposed direction of our networked milieu.

For example, by nature of being a limited-purpose device, as opposed to the iPad’s more generalized capabilites, the Amazon Kindle has, at least anecdotally, allowed far more people to focus on reading long-form writing. Another option, and one that I use when writing longer papers, is Freedom for Mac, a simple software tool for OSX that disables wifi connectivity allowing me to avoid distractedly slipping into the series of tubes. Or take the advances in audio technology which limit external interference.

Sure, these are ways to “drop-out” of the technological world. And sure, Freedom for Mac isn’t as granular as I’d like (i.e. block Facebook but not LexisNexis), but these tools don’t need to be perfect, they just need to nudge people towards behavior that is more conducive to the good life. They need to just slightly alter any potential downsides of “being digital” to make the good parts easier. Unfortunately, the debate surrounding this all-to-often assumes that the trajectory is set and that we cannot change it through the use of innovative tools.

For the first time, the United States Trade Representative is accepting public comments on the Special 301 Review process, the policy tool through which they pressure other countries to raise their intellectual property rights. Comments are due tomorrow, so check out Public Knowledge’s action alert page. My comments are below.

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Dear Ms. Groves,

I write to you today as an American student, creator and someone who cares deeply about the developing world and its future prosperity. Like you, I believe proper intellectual property policies are essential to a well functioning economy and society. However, I have strong disagreement with the ways the USTR has traditionally gone about influencing the intellectual property rights in countries around the world. While public comments are a laudable first step – and one for which I am grateful to have the opportunity – substantive changes to the actual Special 301 recommendations should be made, as well.

The continuation of American economic success is dependent on strong trading partners. This has long been the logic behind pressuring foreign countries to increase their levels of intellectual property rights. Intellectual property, though, is not a unidirectional instrument. As Professor Michael Heller explains in his book, Gridlock Economy, government granted monopolies such as copyright and patents are most effective when properly calibrated – overshooting this point can lead to wrecked markets, stagnate innovation and dangerous threats to human life. Especially as we emerge from the economic crisis, America needs countries around the world to create innovative new products and services to meet the needs of American consumers and businesses. Anti-competitive, monopoly rights make it harder for developing countries to gain access to the most valuable technologies needed for growth. By limiting the capabilities of foreign firms, the Special 301 Review has, to the detriment of the United States, served to limited the growth of the global economic pie.

Forcing more restrictions upon other countries through always stronger intellectual property is also morally suspect. As Siddharth Sharma and Antara Dutta have shown in relation to India, stronger intellectual property laws in the developing world will transfer rents from poor countries to rich ones, a process exacerbated by the small absolute market size of emerging markets which do not provide the incentives to change the direction of research and development expenditure. By promoting biological patents, as well, the USTR is limiting the ability of small-scale farmers to innovate – something they have always done by cross-breeding and selecting seeds.

This harm to the developing world is also deeply hypocritical. American copyright law gives considerable breadth to consumers through fair use provisions, but Special 301 Reviews have tried to limit other countries limitations and exceptions. This hypocrisy simply sustains anti-American fervor, something this country cannot afford to do.

Intellectual property rights are not simply the purvey of multi-billion dollar corporations. They affect students, farmers and entrepreneurs around the world, oftentimes whose interests are not met by current USTR policy. We should encourage governments to find efficient, not strong, intellectual property policies so that these government granted monopolies can play the role they are supposed to: promote creativity and innovation.

Sincerely,

Kevin Donovan

Interesting passage from Darfur: A New History of a Long War by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal:

The Kalashnikov rifle changed the moral order of Darfur. The Abbala had lived by an honor code that included loyalty, strenuous self-discipline when herding camels and communal responsibility for homicide. The principle of paying diya, or blood money, to the kin of an individual killed in a feud ensured that violence was a collective responsibility. In the era of spears and swords, and even the earlier rifles, a killing was a deliberate an individual act readily traceable to the man responsible. Fights rarely had more than a handful of fatalities. The AK-47 – capable of slaughtering an entire platoon, truckload of people, or family - swept this aside. Blood money for a single massacre could exceed the camel wealth of a whole lineage. The sheer number of bullets fired made it impossible to ascertain who had shot whom. Young men with gun were not only able to terrify the population at large, but were free of the control of their elders.

[For a course entitled Technology & Social Justice I had to put together a brief presentation on agricultural innovation. I decided to use the lens of Eric von Hippel's user-innovation theory to examine farmer innovation in developing countries. For a similar riff, check out Ethan Zuckerman on innovating from constraint and the fantastic AfriGadget blog.]

Introduction

In the early 1970s, if you happened to be hiking in the woods around Marin County, you might have witnessed a rather strange sight: on the paths traditionally trod by horses or backpackers, an increasing number of outdoor enthusiasts were careening down the hills on bicycles. At the time, what we know as mountain biking was unheard of – bicycles were ridden exclusively on properly paved roads and sidewalks. The modern distinction between “road bike” and “mountain bike” quite simply did not exist. Why would it if no one wanted to pedal up and down rock-strewn dirt paths?

But, sure enough, some people did think this breakneck activity was a good idea. Unfortunately, their bicycles were incapable of handling the tumultuous rides on which the daredevils took them. So, with remarkable ingenuity, the bikers began modifying their bikes – tougher rubber for the wheels, motorcycle-style braking mechanisms – and soon enough, they started selling these “clunkers” to less mechanically inclined experimenters. Today, the mountain bike market in the U.S. is worth nearly $4 billion.[i]

The experience of mountain biking is not unique – in the past twenty years, researchers have documented a wide range of industries that experience what MIT Professor Eric von Hippel calls “user innovation.” These range from semiconductors to software to windsurfing. The proliferation of inexpensive digital communication and prototyping methods is only adding to the amount of user innovation. According to von Hippel, this form of innovation is an important source of novel product concepts and, in turn, economic growth, but do the insights of user innovation theory apply to the experience of poor farmers in the developing world?

Lead Users

Not everyone is an innovator. Not everyone who rides bicycles off-road takes the time to modify their road bike. Sometimes people will only try a new product if they receive it from a business. Those that do innovate, however, are called “lead users” and, as von Hippel explains, they exhibit two main characteristics, regardless of their specific innovations:

• Lead users “are ahead of the majority of users in their populations with respect to an important market trend…”
• And “they expect to gain relatively high benefits from a solution to the needs they have encountered there.”[ii]

Lead users, who do form a substantial portion of all users, are generally driven to innovate due to the homogeneity of mass-market products; that is, they have unmet needs due to unique circumstances or desires. For various reasons, it is difficult for firms to meet all the needs of their customers. Economies of scale favor “one size fits all” manufacturing. Information can be “sticky” meaning that transferring the specific context of use from users, where it is generated, to firms, can be expensive. “As a result, users generally have a more accurate and more detailed model of their needs than manufacturers have” so they can better tailor their products to their needs by, say, adding tougher rubber or better brakes.[iii]

The fact that these innovators are not profit-seeking firms has some important implications. Most curiously to economists is the practice of freely sharing these innovations. If mountain biking is now a multi-billion dollar industry, the innovations made by those early enthusiasts surely had economic value. So why did they not capture it? Why do open source software programmers freely distribute their code? It turns out, capturing the rents from innovation is not always straight-forward or desired – registering intellectual property can be confusing and expensive and, in many cases, the reputational improvements that come from sharing the process behind your sturdier bicycle with your community is “payment” enough for passionate individuals.[iv]

Democratizing Farmer Innovation?

At first glance, innovations in software, mountain biking, and semiconductors seem like a far call from what is needed to help the poor farmers who constitute sizable portions of the population in developing countries; but might the user innovation theory provide an advantageous frame for innovation by farmers? Can innovative farmers be seen as lead users? And what are the implications of doing so? To begin to answer these questions, consider the story of Namwaya Sawadogo.

Namwaya, from Burkina Faso, provides for twenty family members, and through various innovations, he has moved from a small itinerant trader to a stable, relatively wealthy farmer. Through low-tech changes to his farm, such as constructing stone bunds and expanding into biologically diverse eucalyptus farming, Namwaya has become widely recognized in Burkina Faso as an innovator, even receiving visits from ranking officials.[v]

In many ways, Namwaya fits the archetype of a lead user – his innovations were motivated by the most fundamental of concerns, live or death, and he substantially benefited personally from them. In a survey of the motivations for farmer innovation, this is confirmed with food security toping the list while less essential goals, such as “better taste” correspond to less than one percent of the respondents.[vi] Furthermore, Namwaya was in front of market trends by creating innovations, such as conserving biodiversity, which would, in time, become larger movements.

Namwaya and other farmer innovators in developing countries are the victims of the same systemic market shortcomings that required mountain bikers to innovate. These market failures, such as the lack of appropriate technologies with regard to cost and durability, arise for numerous reasons in the developing world. In chronicling the trouble with traditional agriculture technology transfer, the authors of Farmer Innovation in Africa note that,

“[M]any of the technologies generated and promoted [through technology transfer] are too expensive for the hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers who cannot afford to invest in the packages of required inputs, such as introduced seed, fertilizers and pesticides. Moreover, these packages are often standardized and promoted countrywide without regard to agroecological differences and poorly suited to the diverse and variable conditions of small holders in semi-arid and other marginal areas.”[vii] [Emphasis added.]

The cultural differences are important, too, especially with regard to women innovators. For example, although women often carry much of the farm burden, their innovative ideas often need to pass the approval of the husband who heads the family. Innovations that come from the bottom-up, through a user-innovator, are almost always low cost and more acceptable to the local conditions. The same difficulties firms have in the developed world – sticky information, economies of scale – are present and could even be exacerbated if firms do not believe that there is a “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.”

Von Hippel’s theory, though, does not map perfectly to farmer innovation in the developing world. In many ways it is overly general, especially given what we know about the nature of farmer innovators. They often exhibit a number of characteristics:

• Innovators have often been exposed to other areas through time in other parts of the country or world;
• Innovators tend to be relatively rich, giving them opportunity to experiment;
• Innovators are mostly middle-aged full-time farmers who have the experience necessarily to finely tune their farm systems;
• Innovators have strong personalities, but do not require formal education.[viii]

Moreover, although recent advances in information and communication technologies have greatly altered the communicative capabilities of poor farmers, illiteracy, scarce free time and the lack of broad communities of innovation in the developing world could limit the ability to disseminate user innovations.

Policy Implications

Given these strengths and weaknesses of von Hippel’s theory with regard to farmer innovation, what should those seeking to promote the livelihoods of poor farmers do? One of the most pressing concerns is to align intellectual property rights with their goal of promoting innovation. The growth of biotechnology has increasingly sidelined farmers who “have always been responsible for seed-innovation by selectively saving, planting and breeding seeds.” The patented nature of new seeds limits the flexibility of farmers who now need “permission to innovate.”[ix] Von Hippel has argued that countries without a long history of innovation policies biased towards large firms (i.e. developing countries) are better positioned to adapt to the user-innovator paradigm, but given the bargaining power of large firms compared to small farmers, there is still plenty to fear.[x]

Smaller steps are also possible: educational grants could increase exposure to other areas, better policing could reduce fears about physical theft of innovative products, and subsidies and information-sharing networks could promote the diffusion of ideas.

No theory is perfect or all-powerful, but ones with explanatory power can provide useful framing to real-world phenomena. Eric von Hippel’s user innovation model provides much of that explanatory power to farmer innovation in poor countries while still leaving room for local adaptation.

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[i] Lüthje, C., Herstatt, C., & von Hippel, E. (2005). User-innovators and “local” information: The case of mountain biking. Research Policy, 34(6), 951-965. doi: 10.1016/j.respol.2005.05.005

[ii] Von Hippel, Eric. Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge: MIT, 2005. Print.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] von Hippel, E. (2007). Horizontal innovation networks–by and for users. Industrial and Corporate Change. doi: 10.1093/icc/dtm005

[v] Reij, Chris, and Ann Waters-Bayer, eds. Farmer Innovation in Africa: A Source of Inspiration for Agricultural Development. Minneapolis: Earthscan Publications, 2001. Print.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Braun, Viktor, and Cornelius Herstatt. “Barriers to User-Innovation: The Paradigm of “Permission to Innovate”" ICMIT (2006). Print.

[x] von Hippel, E., & Jin, C. (2009). The major shift towards user-centered innovation: Implications for China’s innovation policymaking. Journal of Knowledge-based Innovation in China, 1(1), 16-27.