Innovation at the Intersection of Scarcity and Abundance

by Nathaniel Whittemore

categories: Emerging Markets, innovation, Trends

Published May 17, 2009 @ 10:54AM PT

(via Flickr)

Is scarcity driving innovation, or a dampening force?

In a Friday column on his FastCompany Design4Impact blog, frog design lead Robert Fabricant advanced an argument that our conception of innovation is changing. Whereas we once saw innovation as the result of having access to cutting edge technology, Fabricant points out that major multinational corporations like Nokia are now looking closer to ground level for new ideas.

Part of this move is a larger shift in the relationship between businesses and their customers, but it also may be, in Fabricant's mind, a product of particular combination of forces:

...it is worth considering what happens when the two conditions meet, as is increasingly the case--when a culture dominated by resources scarcity is confronted with an abundance of different resources (mobile networks and social capital).

After all, "scarcity" is no longer synonymous with poverty. True scarcity exists in very remote, rural regions of the world. But poverty is more often characterized these days by dense urban slums. Areas where there is an abundance of social resources, marketplaces and a growing abundance of information and media as well.

What we are seeing more and more is the collision of scarcity and abundance (which was the topic of last year's Pop!Tech conference, for those lucky enough to attend). We are increasingly confronted with images of street kids in India saving up the few rupees they can scrounge from scavenging scrap metal to play video games or buy minutes for their mobile phones. As urban slums become the defining human condition, you will see an acceleration of innovation. Density and connectivity are the big game changers that will drive innovation for generations to come. Not scarcity.

This dialogue - between companies and communities and between immediate need and aspiration is what makes it so exciting to work in emerging markets. I think that Fabricant is absolutely right to identify "density and connectivity," as the driving factors of innovation moving forward.

The social tools we're experimenting with now are increasingly focusing on augmenting and accelerating collaboration and resource discovery within offline communities, and local entrepreneurs are at the forfront of the local customization which can really unleash that power. Answerbird.com, one of the first products launched by Jon Gosier's Appfrica Labs is a case in point. It builts off of the Facebook platform to make it easier for Kampala, Uganda's 60,000+ Facebook users to ask and recieve essential information from one another.

I continue to think that this sort of innovation and experimentation has more financial and social potential than just about anything out there.