In an attempt to optimise our resources and to ensure that government is kept abreast with world trends in technology, we in South Africa have established a statutory body, the National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI), whose sole purpose is to provide advice for policy.
I must emphasise that the role of NACI is primarily focused on the "for policy" issues rather than advising on existing policies although from time to time in my capacity as Minister I do require the organisation to provide me with short-term technical advice.
The distinction we have drawn between the "for" policy and the "on" policy has had a fundamental impact on the profile of people who constitute this advisory body. We need people who are quite a rare breed and their competencies are certainly way beyond the ability to formulate policy.
The term 'new economy' is often used, and can mean different things to different people. In the high-hype days of Internet start-ups, the new economy was all about how businesses not only conducted themselves by means of the Internet, but how their entire existence was transformed and even contained in the Internet.
The hype bubble has burst, and one is left asking what is the 'new economy'? What are the true technological and business innovations that in an inter-linked fashion can make a lasting impact on our society?
Information and communication technologies and innovations remain a potent catalyst for equipping businesses with new ideas - and the tools to implement these ideas.
At the same time, ICTs have for many years been touted as the tools to leapfrog developing countries into the first world. Now that the hype is over, is this still the case? We believe so, and there are many examples of 'next wave' technologies which can ultimately create an impact in both developed and developing societies, and which can promote global application of technology for constructive business exchange and economic growth for all.
In our debating forums we are constantly looking at innovative ideas on how best we can make use of technological developments. Let me by way of some examples illustrate our continued belief that the digital economy is only just being incubated.
The benefits of convergence
The convergence of IT and communications, which in many countries already feels like a seamless continuum, sometimes seems far off in remote rural areas in the developing world. Yet this convergence offers tremendous opportunities in countries where lack of existing ICT infrastructure calls for novel ideas and innovation, with an emphasis on elegant simplicity.
Tsilitwa, is a small community in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa, which is benefiting from a project that is piloting the use of ICTs integrated with the correct facilitation and community ownership, to support the training of school pupils and support of micro entrepreneurial enterprises. Examples like this abound across Africa and show what can be done without extreme sophistication, but rather pragmatic technological innovation without losing the essential elements of integration with community needs and realities.
High bandwidth is expensive, and yet the need for a community to be linked with medical experts is high. So a pragmatic process for relaying essential information and digital images between community healthcare workers and specialists at the nearest hospital, has transformed the way people are diagnosed and cared for, and has drastically reduced the barriers of cost and travel time associated with visits to the hospital.
The notion of an EGrid has received much attention from European institutions involved in research and development. The harnessing of computing power in this manner creates huge capacity for number crunching, simulations, storage and a host of other direct applications. When we review these developments we have identified a specific area where EGrid can make huge difference in a developing country. This technology provides an opportunity for the harnessing of computing capacity that may be "idle" for periods of time to perform massive computational tasks in a 'capacity leasing' mode. In regions where access to a single PC is a challenge, the opportunity to engage in major research projects through access to simulation and storage capacity could have exciting possibilities.
In a country [like South Africa] where cellular communications are both world class and have had a significant impact on the lives of people in rural areas, using the EGrid concept via access to a cellular telephone can open up doorways to research and experimentation that will catalyse new ways of learning which did not seem possible before.
We are also investigating alternative forms of infrastructure deployment in terms of high altitude telecommunications platforms. Deploying this technology could be most effective in areas that are currently under-served. Both rural and urban, first world and third world environments can benefit from the ideas and implementation mechanisms currently being researched and developed.
In the medium term, the developments around secure payment systems, smart cards and access provided by wireless mobility, will create a digital economy amongst those currently completely without access to banking or any form of non-cash transactions. And this is a route to a time where the value we generate for communities and organizations will be remunerated through wireless, intangible Rands, Euros and Dollars that we exchange for needed commodities with almost the ease of thought.
Allowing our minds to wander just a little, we see that another area that is core to some of the issues of globalisation, is the realization that the digital world, to a large degree, is a clinical and rational environment. The future holds for us the opportunity to navigate through this global environment with increased sensitivity to cultural norms and personal attributes. Although the creation of such culturally aware cyber environments is still far off, the road towards this includes the creation of language translation technologies, emergence of environment immersion technologies and the creation of mechanisms for different cultural environments to interact in cyberspace. These may seem like esoteric and abstract concepts, yet they drive the creation of technologies that have real application today: context sensitive software applications that are more able to serve the needs of the computer illiterate.
The digital route to transformed lives
It would be extremely remiss of me not to open the debate on Open Source software. Perhaps the phenomenon of Open Source will evolve to revolutionise our current understanding of the digital economy. Our belief is that Open Source will have a profound impact on this new economy by underpinning it with fundamentally new business models where a culture of openness, transparency and sharing of pre-competitive platforms between competing organizations will distinguish itself radically from our current paradigms.
Indeed, the whole debate around how knowledge is created will ultimately be underpinned by the capacity for ICTs to facilitate and enable this in profoundly improved ways. The current paradigms are still stuck in the structuring of information so it can be stored and data manipulated in computers. Just as current businesses are increasingly recognizing the value of knowledge relationships, not only within their organizations but in the context of their network of partners and suppliers, we can foresee a time where compartmentalised structures are replaced by networks of contexts that allow us to capture information in many directed ways, this will bring us a step closer towards knowledge networks in cyberspace.
We can merely speculate and dream about the potential impact of such developments at this stage, but the potential to transform how people learn and explore their economically active lifespan is clearly apparent.
So perhaps the new new economy is one where ICTs, based on platforms like HAPS, EGrids and pragmatic technology innovations, create a culturally sensitive cyber-environment that provides effective plumbing for businesses to operate, facilitates learning and development of human intellectual capital and provides us with whole new ways of interacting with each other across the planet thereby enabling us to create, share and exploit knowledge, ideas, and perhaps even sometimes wisdom.
The most exciting part of dreaming about these possibilities is that the road to this place is overflowing with quick wins - ways of improving quality of life for so many different people, with different needs, departure points and goals. This is the opportunity we must continue to pursue.
The conference Beyond the Backlash: Where next for the digital economy? in London on 7 November, 2002 was organised by Demos, the Forum for the Future, the Institute for Public Policy research (ippr) and iSociety at the Work Foundation.
