Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Om Malik has this short item about rolling out tech in the developing world to test and learn before rolling it out in the higher-stakes markets of the more-highly-industrialized world.

Emerging Markets As Cutting Edge Tech Test Beds

Worth reading, and worth contemplating how the phenomenon — which Malik addresses in business-technology terms — also applies to boosting environmental and social goods in the developing world, as discussed in this May 2007 post from WorldChanging:

Principle 8: Leapfrogging

Whatever angle you take on this — human development, green business, filthy lucre, whatever — it certainly seems worthwhile to test concepts in markets without an intrenched infrastructure that must be overcome. Doing so eliminates one of the major status-quo inputs to the market equation, which would seem to make experimentation easier.