By IANS
London : India has much to offer to the IT world but has even more to gain from it by piggybacking on foreign inventions to move to the front of the technological pack, The Economist says.
India and China have made clever use of foreign technology – assembling it, copying it, servicing it and customising it – but, as Simon Cox explains in a special report in this week’s Economist, their firms have yet to create too much to rival it.
While “techno-nationalists” may worry about this, economists would find much to applaud, he adds.
Cox is the South Asia business correspondent of the business newsweekly. He has studied at Cambridge, Harvard and the London School of Economics and worked at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York.
The report argues that India and China have more to gain from the adoption and assimilation of technology than from invention.
The most urgent task for the two countries is to make wider use of know-how that already exists, the report says, citing India’s generic drug makers as an example.
The report maintains that India could resolve not to invent another thing and still prosper mightily. It does not even have to catch up with the world as it has so much to gain merely by catching up with itself by narrowing the gap between its best firms and the rest.
According to the report, India does not need to focus on invention per se in order to flourish. Instead, if it gainfully absorbs, assimilates and uses the technology available in the country, India’s economy could transform itself as China’s has.
“Indian and Chinese firms have a comparative advantage in finding new uses for existing technologies and combining them in novel ways,” he says.
“This kind of ‘architectural innovation’ may be scientifically modest but it can nonetheless be commercially significant. This was, after all how Japan’s electronics firms came to dominate their market,” Cox adds.
The report asserts that while India and China cherish the idea of pushing back the limits of technology, invention is risky, costly and frustrating work. Imitation still has much to recommend it.
The report concludes that ultimately it will be the countries that are willing to mix-and-match imported knowledge with ideas of their own that will thrive.