IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/innchp/978-1-4614-2077-4_1.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Exploring a Vision for Sustaining Innovation in African Economies

In: Sustaining Innovation

Author

Listed:
  • Nam Mokwunye

    (Stanford University)

Abstract

There is an opportunity for African countries to capitalize on economic gains made in the telecommunication sector over the last decade and self-imposed pressure to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Thus far, African leaders have accepted capacity building and infrastructure development as two responsibilities which, when implemented, should accelerate internal and regional economic growth. But to accelerate development and overcome socioeconomic challenges associated with competing in an information-driven, flat economy, leadership in African governments, businesses and research (academic and nonacademic) must adopt a scalable and sustainable technology transfer agenda designed for multihelix innovation. Such an agenda would allow internal and external stakeholders to benefit from the network of productive information, transactions, and human capital that the continent’s telecommunication operators have accumulated over the decade. With multihelix collaboration, these physical networks could become transformative platforms that make it possible to scale economies, increase security and crop yields, promote human rights and civil liberties, improve health service response, multiply transactions and Foreign Direct Investments (FDI), and accelerate intellectual content exports. The convergent telemedia platforms could fuse physical infrastructure with virtual networks, social applications, and human activity to sustainably galvanize innovation, generate opportunities, create value, and change lives. New business models such as pay-as-you-go and residual revenue sharing, which leverage the absence of legacy systems, can facilitate this fusion.

Suggested Citation

  • Nam Mokwunye, 2012. "Exploring a Vision for Sustaining Innovation in African Economies," Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management, in: Steven P. MacGregor & Tamara Carleton (ed.), Sustaining Innovation, edition 1, chapter 0, pages 1-14, Springer.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:innchp:978-1-4614-2077-4_1
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-2077-4_1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:innchp:978-1-4614-2077-4_1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.