Sunday’s New York Times had an article by G. Pascal Zachary titled “Inside Nairobi, The Next Palo Alto”.  The author points out that most technological innovation is created either in wealthy countries or in China and India.  Yet, the rest of the world may be seeking solutions that comprehend their unique constraints.  For example, despite lack access to high speed internet, frequent power failures, political instability and no university training on the latest programming languages, there are aspiring entrepreneurs in Nairobi writing programs for the new iPhone (which is not even available in the country yet so they use iPhone software simulators). 

In many developing countries such as Kenya, there are few wired phone lines or personal computers so; mobile phones have become an indispensable communication and computing platform.  G. Pascal Zachary’s article share the fact that in Kenya four times as many people have cell phones than have bank accounts and, text messages have become much more important than e-mail.  This has led to the availability of very low cost mobile phones with limited functionality from major manufacturers specifically designed for these markets.  Clearly, local programmers are brought up in an environment of limited bandwidth and memory which results in their developing “tight” or “light” applications.  Now, Google is opening a development office there which may lead to Nairobi becoming a center for technologies targeted toward emerging economies. 

I’m sure that for many of you, this talk of developing software in an environment of limited computing resources brings back “old” memories (dating all the way back to the 1980’s and earlier…before the concept of “bloatware” ever existed).  It seemed like it took exceptional skills and an intimate understanding of the underlying platform for programmers to architect and develop robust solutions in those days.  I won’t bore you with lots of examples from “those days”…but, I will just mention a couple to make the point about sparking innovation. 

BMC Software, which is now a $1.7B firm, began in the early 80’s when John Moores addressed the issue of limited communications bandwidth in the U.S. for the transmissions between central mainframe computers and remote CRT terminals.  His software solution to the bandwidth problem significantly enhanced the productivity of his customer’s personnel and launched a firm that became known for its software innovation.  In an even earlier time…there was the challenge of landing a human on the moon.  Up until the Apollo missions all computations for flights at NASA had been performed on analog computers.  So, MIT and Raytheon develop the Apollo Guidance Computer (ACG) which was the first significant use beyond the military for rudimentary, rare, very expensive integrated circuits.  This scarcity of computing power led the all the hardware and software innovations which were required to produce a small and reliable onboard computer for the space program.  It is amazing today to think that the ACG only had 36K of storage (rope core memory where each 1 or 0 was manually wrapped with a wire and magnetic donut – no room for errors in the code back then) and 2K of random access memory which was enough to safely land a man on the moon and return to earth. 

What can we take away from these or other examples of innovations that were born in an environment of scarcity?  Is there current opportunity for firms to challenge their product development groups to create innovative ways to solve problems by constraining the underlying platform or components?  Could this lead to innovations for meeting the needs of emerging and/or developed countries?  What could be the opportunity gained by opening small product development labs in less developed countries such as what Google is doing?