A Brave New World? Are the emerging economies the new technological innovators?

Originally published in Battle of Ideas festival.

QQ, Tudou, Mixi and CyWorld are not familiar names in the West, but these websites based in China, Japan and South Korea are more popular,  profitable and technically innovative than their Western counterparts,  MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. South Korea and Japan are the most  advanced internet markets in the world, with China and India rapidly catching up. Yet we in the West seem oblivious to the development of such technologies in Asia. The dynamic emerging economies of the East are conveniently pigeonholed as the world’s new manufacturing base  (China) or a powerhouse for service industries (India), while the  high-end ‘knowledge economy’ is still seen as the preserve of the West.  Is it time to revise this view and hail the innovative character of the  rising East?

The fast-paced economic development of the emerging economies seems  bound up with a wider culture of dynamism. Innovation in China, for  example, seems unhindered by the risk-aversion, regulation, and  short-term instrumentalism that hampers innovation in the West. So is  risk-taking Eastern ‘can-do’ outstripping overly-cautious Western  ‘know-how’? How far can the pioneer pragmatism of the emerging economies  take us in innovating new technologies? How far can a country such as  China really extend the boundaries of technical and intellectual  innovation while freedom of thought is confined by censorship, and  democracy is curtailed? What, if anything, can the West learn from  technical innovation coming out of the emerging economies?

Speakers
Dr Norman Lewis
director (innovation), PwC; co-author, Big Potatoes: the London manifesto for innovation

Parminder Bahra
poverty and development correspondent, The Times

Dinah McLeod
Head of Sustainability Practice, BT Global Services; formerly, policy adviser, Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and social protection specialist, World Bank, Washington DC

Chair

Martyn Perks
digital business consultant and writer; co-author, Big Potatoes: the London manifesto for innovation

Produced by
Martyn Perks digital business consultant and writer; co-author, Big Potatoes: the London manifesto for innovation

Dr Norman Lewis director (innovation), PwC; co-author, Big Potatoes: the London manifesto for innovation