THE ECONOMIST TECHNOLOGY QUARTERLY

The December 14th issue of the Economist magazine includes its Technology Quarterly (TQ). The first essay of the TQ focuses on the Bayh-Dole Act, attributing to it a major role in the improvement of the rate of technological innovation in the U.S. I too am impressed by the benefits of the law which gave intellectual property rights for government sponsored research to universities, small and medium enterprises, government research laboratories (where the invention occurred, rather than to the entire government), and importantly, to people who did the inventing. I have spent far too much time over the past decades discussing IPR policy with lawyers and bureaucrats in large government and quasi-governmental organizations to take lightly the quality of insight that Bahy-Dole represents. Simply, it gets the incentives more-nearly right to commercialize inventions made with public money, and in so doing gets lots of producer benefits and consumer benefits from the publicly financed knowledge out to the economy and people. That is a great accomplishment!

The Economist economic bias comes through in the essay. In my opinion it attributes too much of the success in improving innovation rates to a single law, and not enough to the technological wave on which the US rode, to the improvement in knowledge of how to manage innovation, to the restructuring of the economy and reengineering of enterprises, to the marked success of the US in drawing talent and money to its industry and putting it to productive use.

The TQ describes a lot of advances in ICTs that can be expected shortly, as the result of what we might think of as normal technology. (Kuhn talked about normal science in his famous book – the science that most scientists do most of the time, filling in the knowledge gaps identified by the relevant community as important within existing theory. I think normal technology may be similarly conceived as those advances of the technology frontier that are relatively predictable and available to the industrial R&D labs.)

I was impressed by the predictions that there will soon be available
· Recordable CD-ROM (using blue lasers);
· 3D LCD displays for personal computers, affordable, with software to match;
· digital radio, improving radio quality and range and opening the AM and FM spectrum to new applications;
· organic semiconductors, bringing new information display options;
· new extensions of programs that allow publishing not only in visual forms over the internet, but in voice mode.
Anybody reading this who doesn’t know about these technologies should probably rectify that situation soon.

In one article, TQ suggested that telephone e-commerce is likely to be more important (for quite a while) than Internet e-commerce. Voice recognition, voice generation, and other technologies are coming online, made possible by cheaper computer power and memory. It occurs to me that the implication for developing nations may be that telephone service jobs may not last. Some developing nations have been using the mastery of European languages by their citizens as the basis to develop businesses offering these services. Low wage rates in India give Indian firms a competitive advantage in telephone based services over firms hiring highly paid U.S. workers. However, automating the service may be cheaper still. It might be fairly important to estimate how long before human telephone service providers go the way of buggy whips before investing heavily in the development of telephone-service boiler rooms in developing nations.

TQ spends considerable space on the advances in bio-computing, gene-chips, and biological research. I wonder how many developing nations will be able to utilize bio-computing sufficiently well to compete with the U.S., Japan and Europe. Not many! Were more being done with grid computing (the utilization of idle time on the networks of millions of PCs in the world) for developing nations, I would be less concerned. Perhaps more to the point, developing nations are more concerned with developing technologies to meet their own needs than are developed nations. There are exception opportunities to utilize bio-computing and other new techniques of biological research to increase the rate of discovery:
· of new vaccines and affordable treatments for tropical diseases and the other diseases of poverty;
· of better varieties of basic food crops; and
· of new vaccines and affordable treatments for veterinary diseases found primarily in developing nations.
I suspect that the developing nations will not sufficiently master the new techniques to fully take advantage of these opportunities. Developing nation researchers who do master the techniques will find powerful incentives to move to developed nations where they can be applied more productively (to solve the problems of developed nations).

Material for a lot of thought.