The role of ICT sector in expanding economic opportunity.

Historical perspective.

• The ICT are the pioneers in adressing needs.
• In the 80´s the importance were the PTTS and were expensive and with an atrocious quality.
• The data network was unexistent
• In the past 20 years innovation has accelerated dramatically.
• Technology only increases productivity when lots of people have access.

Fundamental role of ICT in modern economic.

• Reduce transaction costs and thereby improve productivity
• Offer immediate connectivity – voice, data, visual –
• Substitute for other, more expensive means of communicating and transacting
• Increase choice in the marketplace and provide access to otherwise unavailable goods and services
• Widen the geographic scope of potential markets
• Channel knowledge and information of all kinds

Economic opportunity obstacles

• Geographic isolation
• Lack of competition and high prices for consumers
• Lack of competition and low prices for producers
• Legal exclution
• Political voice
• Social capital

The business case for engagement.

ICT companies to help the poor get richer is opportunity.

• New and Expanding Markets

As described above, ICT increase efficiency, productivity, and access to goods services, information, and markets.

• Low-income households.

ICT become cheaper and more powerful, their uptake in low-income groups will grow exponentially because they are productivity tools.

As economic opportunity expands, many of these micro-entrepreneurs will enter the formal economy, as the salaried employees of others or as formal small business owner-operators.

• Small and médium-sized enterprices.

SME are already of increasing interest to large ICT companies

The numbers do reveal some close interaction between SME and overall economic health.

INNOVATION

Developing and emerging markets can also drive innovation.

Innovation must not only be affordable, reliable, and relevant, it must also have a low “total cost of ownership” including power and maintenance costs.

Innovation blowback

While innovations like these are required to tap and grow low-income markets, they have potentially broad applicability in higher-income segments and in developed countries as well.

In the ICT sector, both technological and business model innovations have the potential to blow back.

In addition, ICT can be expected to facilitate many of the innovations that will “blow back” in other industries.

Business Strategies for the ICT Sector in Expanding Economic Opportunity

Because the technologies themselves have such significant potential for impact, the most important way ICT companies can expand economic opportunity is to get those technologies out there and simultaneously drive the development and diversification of relevant content, applications, and services.