The Missing innovation

March 24,2020

last update: 2024-11-19

Historically, Most innovation has originated from developed nations and trickled down to developing ones, very much following the Trickle down efffect

And it makes sense. Creating new tech is costly and developing nations cannot afford such R&D costs. As the economy is cash strapped and there are many more mouths to feed. This asymmetry is why “developed nations” stay ahead of the curve while “developing ones” trod along. For example India created it’s first indigenous microprocessor as late as 2018 and India lags in tech among it’s asian counterparts. I’ll call this constant race done by developed and developing nations in innovation as the catch-up game.

But the last 20 years have made it incredibly easy to access information and grow. This means, Supply chains are faster now, you can get anything delivered in a day and much much more. These goes to show that our catch-up game has gotten much better and that we’re closing the gap

But innovation is still exuberantly done mostly from developed nations.

The gap is just not closing fast enough and it feels like we are in a perpetual Achille’s paradox

This problem, I believe, arises when there is a gap in knowledge/innovation for a whole nation or for people at the apex of a nation on a certain thing.

For a historical example, Self Service Laundry are common in developed nations like UK, US. But there is no such conception in India. The phenomena is because UK and US started using washing machines in 1960s and they were incredibly costly at the time. To distribute the cost, laundromats and such companies propped up trying to capitalise on it and setup shops per community making it simpler and more accessible to people. But, by the time washing machine came to India the cost has been reduced due to rapid industrialisation, that most middle class could afford one. Now a whole nation lacks that experience and knowledge of running such an enterprise.

Another example is in, Cars and motorbikes. Developed nations were the first to adopt both. But then Henry Ford in 1913 revolutionised car production using his innovative “Assembly line” production. Bringing the cost of cars much lower making it a mass market product. A lot more people now had access to car. By the time Bikes caught up, cars were the status quo. But that didn’t happen in India. By the time cars and bikes came to india. Bike production had adopted the same assembly line and were many folds cheaper than a car and were now the go to. And a whole nation grows, finding it difficult to even imagine that there are doordash delivery boys in US doing delivery in cars because bikes are a luxury.

A more recent example, Gitlab built Gitaly to solve redundancy and scaling issues in their file system. Github is working on something similar. But, almost no Indian startup is present in this space. because the window for “git based innovation” was (relatively) small and its pretty much closed now. And there is no representation from the whole of India Despite it’s population. Now, if the next innovation is coming from a file system, there will be little to no representation from india, because all the talent who is mature enough and knows deep enough would all be in “developed nations” already, purely by virtue of being at the right place right time. And the catch-up gap ever so slightly widens.

Looking at the Indian Startup ecosystem almost every single one of them is a simple CRUD app with a frontend wrapped over a crudely written API. Most “Machine Learning” startups are using tensorflow, scikit-learn and numpy to run their algorithms and that too with datasets that could be easily held in-memory in a single machine.

This, I believe is mostly because of the innovation gap we are facing. Innovation is generally a function of all the things an entity has been exposed to and the amount of connections that can be made. While people at the developed nations were dabbling with internet without dns and building voice over IP before it was even a thing. India was completely asleep and only slowly started waking up after 10s of layers were added to the stack, Now most people in a whole nation only have vague ideas about the modern multitab browser and above. when Internet explorer was the standard browser. They have no idea how the first browsers were running in a single thread and how there was no such things as tabs. We only know the smooth flow that we use everyday.

We’ve become a whole generation of software developers who can’t think deeper than Web APIs and Web apps. And it shows. There are close to no representation in Indian open source based startups and other such truly technical areas. We’ve missed out (and are missing out?) innovations in all those places for the love of react, node and CRUD apps.

My question now is about how do I bridge that gap?

update: 2022-11-04 8:54 pm

I suppose, I could’ve been fairly tunnel visioned in my definition of what “innovation” is. Now that I’m a little older and wiser. I think, there is definitely a lot of value in creating the “crufty” stuff that I would’ve sneered at, a year back.