Doors of Perception, in Delhi

Jeremy Faludi writes on World Changing:

Doors of Perception is a biannual conference put on by the Dutch ministry of Education, Culture and Science; it is a collection of designers, technologists, and other creative people from diverse fields. This year it is held in Delhi, and the theme is “Infra”, meaning infrastructure, but it’s about a range of ways in which technology and innovative design or ideas can help international development and general worldchanging. The first day’s most interesting presentation was by Solomon Benjamin, a researcher/consultant from Bangalore...

Benjamin described how the most innovative places in India, the places where new technology and manufacturing starts, are slums. There is almost no infrastructure, and certainly no help from government; in fact, most activity is underground in order to avoid taxes and general governmental disapproval of things that weren’t part of their plan. These entrepreneurs have no capital, evolving their own methods of financing; they also have no IP law. And yet whole clusters of interdependent companies sprout up making things that are found nowhere else in the country (computer cable mfr.s were his main example).

And it turns out this phenomenon is not unique to India. He pointed out an example in New York, and I would say the same is true in reverse of Silicon Valley--its explosion of innovative companies created an unplanned, unregulated city-sprawl. It’s not a slum, but it does have the highest concentration of Superfund sites in the country. This brings home the point that innovation causes social problems as well as benefits.

Benjamin’s talk reminded me of a characteristic of many non-industrialized nations that I think will push India ahead in the future: everything here is patched, hacked, and customized. You have to do that, because there’s insufficient infrastructure to support the products you use, and because people’s needs are always far beyond what they can buy. As a result, everyone here is a hacker, meaning everyone is an innovator. Normal westerners don’t have the hacker mindset, because products already exist for their needs, and any need can be solved by a purchase; the people who push the envelope only do so because they enjoy it. (This is also why normal people in the industrialized world depend on branding to express themselves, rather than making their possessions into personal folk art like people in the third world do.) Having everyone in your country start with a hacker mindset will help you leapfrog from cheap-labor-source to vital-technology-hub.

The barrier to such leapfrogging is infrastructure, and as technology become more self-contained, more mobile, more peer-to-peer, infrastructure becomes less and less necessary. Ironically, the playing field gets more level the more advanced technology gets. (Not linearly, and not universally, but enough to be hopeful.) As another speaker, Ezio Manzini, phrased it, we’re starting to see the existence of “poor-to-poor” networks, and we should do as much as we can to facilitate them.

Bottom-up-innovation is an absolute necessity these days in India. And its prime time young entrepreneurs to shine in such innovation.