In This Issue: Demand-Drive Innovation Diffusion

While in Seoul, Korea, for an international conference on public management reform, I was checking e-mail through my laptop and the hotel's broadband Internet cable. My father e-mailed me news of a relative's death. Within 15 minutes, I had verified the family's home address and phone number on one website, ordered flowers charged to my credit card on another, had the flowers and a note of condolence sent halfway around the world, e-mailed my father about what I had done, and copied my wife on the response.

This story has two points. First, this occurrence is in no way remarkable. In fact, most of us have become accustomed to responding instantly to such events from anywhere around the globe through complex information and communication technology transactions that would have been inconceivable 10 years ago. The accelerating diffusion of such innovations translates into "the greatest revolution in choice the world has ever known" (Schrage, 2004). The second point, also made by Schrage, is to challenge the traditional view that innovation is driven largely by entrepreneurial inventors and capitalists who are somehow able to intuit ideas and products "whose time has come." Famed economist Joseph Schumpeter (1942) typified this view, stating, "Innovation itself is being reduced to routine. Technological progress is increasingly becoming the business of teams of trained specialists who turn out what is required and make it work in predictable ways" (as cited in Mowery & Rosenberg, 1998, p. 1).

Writing in the December issue of Technology Review, Schrage (2004) proposes a different stance:

The Big Lie of the Information Age is that "Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come." What nonsense. In reality, nothing in this world is more powerful than an innovation that has diffused to the point where it enjoys both global reach and global impact. Ready access to ideas promotes awareness, but ready access to innovation promotes empowerment and opportunity.

(p. 18)

And even more importantly, he embraces an idea that has gained currency among scholars in the field of science and technology studies over the past 15 years or so, namely that users play as important a role in the processes of innovation and diffusion as inventors and entrepreneurs (Fischer, 1992). As Schrage puts it,

[I]nnovation isn't what innovators do; it's what customers, clients, and people adopt. Innovation isn't about crafting brilliant ideas that change minds; it's about the distribution of usable artifacts that change behavior. Innovators—their optimistic arrogance notwithstanding—don't change the world; the users of their innovations do.

(2004, p. 18)

Comparative Technology Transfer and Society recognizes both points. Whereas many of our articles—in keeping with our interdisciplinary and social science–based perspective on innovation—have focused on the importance of institutional and societal variables in the innovation diffusion and adoption process, others (e.g., Mavhunga [2003]) have emphasized the often unexpected and idiosyncratic impact of individual consumers on these processes. As we note in our Statement of Scope,

Technology transfer, as the term is commonly used, describes the process of moving high-tech innovations from laboratories to markets. . . . Technology transfer encompasses at least three dimensions—the product, the people, and the institutions within which those people work and products emerge. Product spans the spectrum from concept through realization, dissemination, and adoption . . . People includes the spectrum of human endeavor, ranging from engineers, designers, and scientists to managers, consultants, team members, entrepreneurs, and organizational employees. The term also encompasses those individuals on the receiving end of transfers—often in nations outside the Western cultures where most technologies emerge. One of our starting assumptions is that the people matter every bit as much, if not more than, the product.

The four articles in this issue illuminate both these points. In the first, Ramon Fernandez-Caamano and Scott Johnson discuss the Consequences of Technology Transfer in the Pueblo Viejo Gold Mine. This article focuses on the initial success and subsequent failure of an international mining concession in the Dominican Republic. For these authors, the essential problem was that the mining project developers and investors paid inadequate...