Innovation and Best Practice in Mobile Technologies for Development

Introduction/Overview This paper is a review of innovation in the ICT entrepreneurship/mobile internet/mobile related applications space. The paper aims to identify best practice in stimulating innovation in developing countries. Definitions of Innovation We use the standard definitions provided by the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS 2011) of both product innovation and process innovation: Product innovation: “the introduction of a good or service that is new or significantly improved with respect to its characteristics or intended uses” Process innovation: “the implementation of a new or significantly improved production or delivery method”. Definitions of innovation in products and processes do not solely refer to the role of technology: all industries can feature innovative dynamics, independently of their degree of technological penetration. Association between innovation and economic prosperity is a mainstream theme in the development field; however, empirical analyses are difficult to perform due to difficulty in measuring a cross-industrial process like innovation. 1 Our objective is to identify best practice in stimulating innovation in developing countries with a focus on the industry of information and communication technologies. We will examine cases where ICT-based industries have contributed to economic prosperity, as well as other positive life standards ranging from health to education and good governance (UNDP 2001). This report specifically focuses on the composite sphere constituted by the “ICT entrepreneurship/mobile internet/mobile related applications space”. The focus on innovation in mobile technologies, as developed and adopted in developing nations, is motivated by (1) the massive uptake of mobile telephony in the South, which has increased access dramatically, and (2) the strong association between adoption of mobile phones and increases in national prosperity/economic growth/key dimensions in social development (Vodafone 2005, Qiang and Rossotto 2008, Vodafone and ICRIER 2009). It is mobile telephony which has the capability of determining a sea-change in the lives of people in the global South.