Graham Dutfield
Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization
Dutfield discusses the persistent idea that that having more knowledge, especially new knowledge with commercial applications, improves a country’s trade balance.
He believes that Anil Gupta’s work, as presented in the same issue of Innovations, is a welcome challenge to the usual assumptions that innovation is by definition “modern,” and that people in developing countries, especially in rural areas, are not innovative and possess little knowledge of use to anyone else.
But its main contribution is not so much to cheerlead for local innovators as to offer plausible ways to create wealth for some of the poorest societies in the world on the basis of the knowledge that rural dwellers already have and the new knowledge coming out of these areas, far more than we suppose.
