To illustrate the example of the three stages we can look at the development of the car. In the beginning only a few people could afford that product. It was highly priced and mainly used as an innovation that you could show off. From that time stem the pictures of people in or in front of a car, showing that they could afford such a product. When Henry Ford innovated the production process of the car, he was able to get the price down to a level that everybody could afford it. As a result various companies (Disney, McDonalds) created ‘places’ to go to with a car. Right now, the car has become such an important asset of our daily lives, that we think we can’t live without it anymore. We don’t have to live where we work anymore, but we can only do so IF we own a car.

Something similar applies to all new technologies, as for instance the mobile phone. It is often said that emerging regions are able to ‘leapfrog’ in the adoption of a new technology, because they ‘lack’ the old infrastructures that stand in the way of wide adoption in Western societies. So we talk about the problems of ‘the last mile‘ that prevent every household in Europe to be connected to high bandwidth internet because that last mile is still made of copper. The argument goes, that, because continents like Africa can leapfrog us and jump onto the high bandwith wagon with more ease, because the don’t have to replace the inferior infrastructure.

But are they really jumping ahead, when they leapfrog to a better infrastructure? The conference last Friday made me doubt that, specifically when you relate it to the adoption cycle from luxury to necessity. Various speakers during the conference told first hand accounts of the need and the want of Africans to be able to communicate using mobile phones as a means. But the costs of making a call are still higher than we are used to in the West. Thus, a digital divide inside an African country is created when one entrepreneur is able to use the mobile phone and the other is not. Increasingly the mobile phone has become a necessity for people in Africa to stay connected, to keep in touch, to do business, to make a living, etc. But the technology is still priced at the level of the luxury good.

So could it be, that leapfrogging has led to a jump into the phase of necessity with the economic side still lagging behind? A situation has arisen that did make a lot of Africans own a phone, but not use it as a mobile to make phone calls, but rather as a camera, a torch, a voice recorder and a videocamera. Now, I’m not necessarily saying that is a bad thing. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t automatically think that leapfrogging leads to a jump in prosperity, and adoption of new technologies per definition. And it might just be, that the leapfrogging to a wireless network has created a lagging behind in especially that area we tend to see they’re leapfrogging over: the use of network communication and data transfer.