IN its technology review in 2017, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology captured this insight from Vanu Bose, a late cellular telephone network entrepreneur then working in Africa: “It takes more creativity and innovation to market a new invention than it did to invent it in the first place.”
In Malaysia, these ideas are all too familiar to our Science, Technology and Innovation funders, such as Cradle, Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre and the Malaysian Technology Development Corp.
They share the frustration of similar organisations worldwide, that all too often the valuable output from funding poured into research and development (R&D) at our universities and public research institutions fails to result in marketable products, systems and services. In most cases, the issue is not a lack of scientific expertise but the rarity of such talent with that of the entrepreneur.
This has been a topic of great ongoing interest to Alfred Watkins, founder and chairman of the Global Solutions Summit — held in New York since 2014.
He notes that, thanks to R&D over the years, we now have effective and affordable solutions for many pressing development problems — renewable energy, improved ways to tap and provide supplies of clean water, solar powered irrigation pumps, off-grid food storage, refrigeration, processing and others.
All these make it ever easier and affordable, in principle, to hit the SDGs’ (sustainable development goals) targets, including in least developed countries. But we need to do far more if we’re to achieve the SDGs, to make full use of the creative talent and outputs of researchers in every country.
A binding constraint, Watkins contends, is that we haven’t yet worked out a good way to complement this creative scientific talent with the more mundane but equally important organisational, entrepreneurial, financial, and business development skills needed to get solutions into the hands of tens, if not hundreds of millions of people. Ironically, he adds, the same prowess that generates new technological solutions may actually exacerbate the deployment challenge.
For example, with older technologies, households, factories, and communities had to be connected to a central water treatment plant or central power plant if they wanted reliable access to potable water or electricity.
For development finance organisations like the World Bank, a loan to the relevant ministry or state-owned utility company was all that was required to provide new generators and treatment plants and also to extend service to new communities.
In many cases, these loans contained a small technical assistance component which trained local engineers and technicians in the ministry or state-owned utility to operate and maintain the newest technology. This is no longer the case.
Many of today’s newest development technologies enable service delivery via small-scale, distributed solutions. And this, in turn, disrupts the old, tried-and-true deployment mechanisms.
It is now possible to provide reliable, affordable electric power via community micro-grids or rooftop solar systems without constructing a central power plant and expensive transmission and distribution lines.
Similarly, it is possible to provide World Health Organisation-quality potable water from saltwater, brackish, or polluted fresh water by deploying a battery of small, relatively inexpensive community water purification kiosks, each equipped with a technologically-advanced nano-filter.
In principle, unlike large-scale power plants and water treatment facilities which take years to build and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, these small-scale distributed solutions can be deployed at a fraction of the time and cost.
The challenge then becomes figuring out how to scale-up the deployment of the inexpensive facilities so that they reach tens of millions of people in a relatively short period of time.
Although the capital cost of these new technologies may be much lower compared with older technologies, the community empowerment, organisational, financial, capacity building and entrepreneurial challenge of deploying, financing, managing, and maintaining thousands of water purification kiosks or microgrids in thousands of communities is substantially more complex.
How we complete the long, last mile journey from lab to large-scale deployment of new technologies is an important consideration for each government, private company and non-governmental organisation as they grapple with how to fulfil their obligations in meeting the SDGs.