Science and Technology Parks in Open Innovation development: One type fits all?

As villagers in Africa and Bangladesh have gone straight quantum leap from no phones to mobile phones, developing countries could leapfrog as well with other innovations. The nature of innovation also changes, and is speeding up. Other periods have seen bursts of considerable technological progress: the introduction of the telegraph, for instance, was equally as disruptive as the internet today. Some developing countries already have higher levels of early stage entrepreneurship, as more people engaged in things such as starting new ventures often because the need for doing so is greater. In many African countries, the users are about to take the worldwide lead in using mobile phones for payments and remittances, thanks to the introduction of schemes like the M-PESA money-transfer service introduced by Vodafone and Citibank group in Kenya. These allow people to send money by using text messages. Now the centrally planned approach is giving way to the more democratic, even anarchic, new model of innovation. Good ideas have always been everywhere, but companies were often too closed to pick them up. The move to an open approach to innovation is really more promising. Unfortunately the government planners, often obsessed with national innovation policies and in a need to create clusters like Silicon Valley, have not learnt the lesson. History also shows that countries that come up with new technologies are often not the ones that commercialize or popularize those inventions. The hypothesis is to stop spreading money around trying to clone lots of Silicon Valleys. Besides, there is an even more important factor than money: the culture.