Young World Shining: Dispatches from the Expanding Frontiers of Innovation

Chances are, if you are reading these words, you are already familiar with my full-length book, Young World Rising: How Youth, Technology and Entrepreneurship Are Changing the World from the Bottom Up (Wiley & Sons, 2010). That is the source work that explains and details the ideas found here. Young World Shining is an extension and an elaboration on those themes, providing additional background, context and stories around the core concepts of youth, technology and entrepreneurship in emerging economies around the world.

The reason for a follow-up is simple: The story has evolved.

Until very recently, the idea of entrepreneurship had always been framed as the narrative of the intrepid individual forging something new solely through the power of his or her vision and will. In this formulation, the fruits of the enterprise belonged rightfully and exclusively to the entrepreneur. Government, society and any type of collective institution was seen as some kind of parasite, free-riding on the superhuman productivity of the heroic business champion.

Today, entrepreneurs are still intrepid, visionary risk-takers, but entrepreneurship has become more collaborative and more social. Networks connect us to ideas, communities and markets instantaneously, opening up new vistas of possibility for those outside the old centers of the world economy, while diminishing the traditional advantages of scale and legacy. Companies are built on platforms created by others: sometimes other companies, sometimes governments, sometimes loose-knit groups of volunteers.

A new generation has come on the scene that rejects the false ideological choice between pursuit of profit and pursuit of social good. This global Millennial generation is more connected to the world and one another as a result of having grown up marinated in digital culture. Collaborative by default, they perceive the world’s problems, and their generational mission, in broader terms than individual success, and they are largely motivated by factors broader than personal enrichment.

With these changes has come a shift in the public understanding of the role of the entrepreneur and entrepreneurship. Society—even government—can be the enabler rather than the inhibitor of entrepreneurial vision, and the self-interest of the entrepreneur operating within the free market system can serve the common good. The goals of the entrepreneur—prosperity, innovation and the right to be judged on merit—are aligned with the things that society at large wants, and needs, to achieve.

Between the time I began writing Young World Rising in 2008 and today, 2011, that insight has gone from being a revelation to being nearly a cliché. Governments, business schools, corporations and NGOs have all embraced the ideology of entrepreneurship with enthusiasm bordering on lust.

Some of the world’s largest and most innovative NGOs including the Gates Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative are now behind development strategies centered on local entrepreneurship. Others, like the Endeavor Foundation and the Kauffman Foundation, are focused on promoting entrepreneurship on a global scale precisely because of the connections between indigenous business creation and other kinds of social and economic development.

Business schools are scrambling to add entrepreneurship classes to the usual assortment of management offerings, as a way to meet rising demand from young students eager to make an immediate impact (and discouraged with their prospects in the current job market). This is especially true in fast-growing emerging economies. I recently visited India, Argentina and Turkey, where new business schools and programs are springing up so quickly that they are having difficulty recruiting enough qualified faculty. In Cordoba, Argentina, I spoke at an entrepreneurship festival that drew more than 1,000 attendees, mostly business students.

Large corporations are trying to get in on the act, with initiatives to develop intrapreneurship and startup cultures within the four walls of companies that are, in reality, quite traditional and bureaucratic. That said, some of these initiatives are genuine and successful. Companies like Google encourage workers to carve out time to pursue their personal projects. India’s Infosys incubates entrepreneurial businesses founded by employees, and often ends up investing in them financially.

All the attention and resources devoted to entrepreneurship have taken on the characteristics of a bubble. In the parlance of the tech analyst firm Gartner Research, entrepreneurship is at the peak of a hype cycle, where expectations threaten to outrace any realistic forecasts of performance.

As an observer and an advocate for entrepreneurship, I bear some responsibility for this state of affairs, and while my own enthusiasm remains high, I feel obliged to report on those areas where it appears that the concept is groaning under too much weight. This volume includes new stories and analysis that add nuance and balance to the unbridled idealism of Young World Rising; it concludes with a new essay that takes stock of the possible future(s) of entrepreneurship in a world that now has a much more sophisticated understanding of its potential.

Discovering the Young World

In 2008 when I started doing the preliminary research for Young World Rising, I thought I would be writing a straightforward follow-up to my first book, Generation Blend, except this time looking at how the Millennials and their new approaches to technology were changing the world of business outside the United States and Europe.

What I discovered was a much more interesting story, with much broader implications. Yes, when young people in poor countries come into contact with information and communication technology, they suddenly become just like any other digital natives: curious, mischievous, inventive and able to take this precious new knowledge in directions that older folks would never imagine. And indeed, this was causing them to butt heads with parents, bosses, teachers and people trying to sell them stuff.

But the thing about young people in poor countries is that there are so many of them. More than 4 billion, in fact. Unlike in the aging West, under-30s in South Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East vastly outnumber their elders. The institutions designed to socialize them and absorb them into the workforce don’t work or aren’t there a lot of the time. And for the past 10 years, some of the largest and richest companies on earth have been spending billions of dollars to equip them with the latest technology and the skills to use it.

So what happens when you put all those billions of young minds in contact with the whole world of ideas, the whole multiverse of potential collaborative opportunities, and the unprecedented power to express their talent on a global scale?

Amazing things happen. Amazing people emerge. And they use the tools at their disposal to create organizations to make their ideas stick.

The implications of this trend point the way toward a much brighter future than most people felt entitled to imagine in 2009, at the depths of the global financial crisis. Inspired by my early findings, and driven by my inherent contrarianism, I started looking for success stories that demonstrated the power of youth and innovation in unlikely places or contexts.

When I began doing interviews in 2008 and 2009, many of my subjects were just random folks with a good idea and a startup, either flattered or confused that a business writer from the United States would care much about what they were doing.

Between the time the manuscript was complete and the book was published, quite a few of them gained international recognition for their vision and accomplishments. Ory Okolloh and Erik Hersman (Ushahidi, Africa) and Lucian Tarnowski (Brave Young Talent, UK) joined Suhas Gopinath (Globals, India) in the World Economic Forum and on the podium giving TEDTalks. DUTO (Colombia) received recognition from the Clinton Global Initiative. Ghana’s mPedigree has received major support from HP to expand its platform internationally. Globant, now a major success story in Argentina and throughout Latin America, is preparing to go public on the NASDAQ in 2011. In the Philippines, commercial IT developer Syntactics and its socially oriented affiliate LetITHelp continue to win awards and recognition for business excellence and moral leadership. Thrillophilia (India) cofounders Abhishek Daga and Chitra Gurnani deepened their business relationship—by getting married in February 2011—even as their company continues to prosper and expand.

Later, some of these same folks were profiled by other writers, including Don Tapscott (MacroWikinomics) and Sarah Lacy (Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky), or in national publications like the Atlantic Monthly and New York Times. In August 2010, the Economist ran several long features on young entrepreneurs in emerging economies that cited many of the same stories and data points that I had used in the book.

In short, what began as a hunch was confirmed by events: the emergence of this new breed of global entrepreneur was in fact a huge business story, and one of the few pieces of good news to emerge at a difficult moment in the world economy.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to take the message to various audiences around the world: industry conferences, civic groups, business schools, corporate executive education events, and entrepreneurship festivals. On one memorable day in June 2010, I keynoted a Washington, D.C., conference for young leaders in the federal government workforce in the morning, then took a cab across town to be interviewed by the libertarian (government-skeptical) Reason magazine in the afternoon, getting a warm reception at both ends of the ideological spectrum.

Part of the reason for this is that entrepreneurship itself is now being understood as something more than the act of crazy, cocky, brilliant individuals making a fortune for themselves through a successful business. The new generation of entrepreneurs is creating social value and broad-based economic prosperity as a direct product of their ambition and innovation. New businesses, including for-profit companies, non-profits and hybrids, are taking direct aim at old problems and failed institutions, and making money by coming up with better solutions.

This is especially true in emerging economies, where poor conditions provide a target-rich environment for better ideas. However, as economic conditions deteriorate in the United States and Europe, some of that same thinking is starting to appear here as well. These nimble new startups provide solutions that are more responsive to market demand than top-down government initiatives, and more authentically engaged than socially responsible large corporations because they are part of the community affected by the problems they are trying to solve.

Policymakers increasingly recognize entrepreneurship as a better way to accomplish some of the traditional aims of the public sector in areas ranging from healthcare to workforce development to crisis response. In an era of fiscal austerity, it costs nothing for government leaders to praise and empower public-minded entrepreneurs, and there is rare agreement across the ideological spectrum for common-sense approaches such as making machine-readable government datasets available to private (entrepreneurial) developers to create useful apps for mobile devices and social networks.

One place where the message of Young World Rising has really resonated is in education—an area where frankly I have very little background, and where I did not envision much of an audience for this work. Every month, I get notes from professors and university department heads from schools around the world, telling me they are using the book in their curricula or teaching the case studies to aspiring entrepreneurs. There are also leaders like Professor Yong Zhao, Director of the Center for Advanced Technology in Education at the University of Oregon, who have been actively trying to bring the ideas and energy of entrepreneurship to classroom teaching and the educational system itself. Every time I travel abroad, I make a point to meet with educators and education policy leaders so that I can better understand the application of these ideas, and hopefully participate in this conversation at a higher level in the future.

Rising and Shining

Young World Shining is a collection of articles, columns and interviews that appeared in the 10 months since the release of Young World Rising, elaborating on many of the key themes and providing additional context for the stories and examples. Young World Shining is intended to be a companion piece to Young World Rising: thus its more modest format and distribution model.

Many of these pieces originally appeared at FastCompany.com, where I write a semiregular online column on global entrepreneurship and innovation. Several ran on Internet Evolution, where I write about the social implications of new technology in the business and consumer spaces. Others are from diverse business publications, websites and my own blog, Emphasis Added (at YoungWorldRising.com/emphasisadded).

I have also included the full unedited transcript of my interview with Herman Chinery-Hesse, founder and CEO of The Soft Tribe, Africa’s largest commercial software developer. In a project that led me to all kinds of fascinating stories and colorful characters, this conversation was probably the most candid and far-ranging, in terms of both Chinery-Hesse’s experiences and his insights. It is, I believe, not a perspective that most American business audiences are ever exposed to, and while I tried to do his story justice in Young World Rising, I wanted to be sure that his unique voice and authoritative perspective came through in full.

The other longer piece, Co-Creating Your Brand with Young World Consumer-Entrepreneurs, is a collaboration with Mike Dover, coauthor (with Sean Moffitt) of Wikibrands: Reinventing Your Company in a Consumer-Driven Marketplace. I know Mike from his days as research director for Don Tapscott’s Toronto-based consulting group New Paradigm (now nGenera). He brings a more pop-culture, consumer-focused perspective to the whole youth-global-mass collaboration thing. Our piece originally ran in Canada’s Ivey Business Journal.