A new World Economic Forum report on the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in growth and development is placing the onus on governments to step up population access to the internet, as a means of accelerating economic development and the emergence of startup companies in their countries.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2015 titled ‘ICT’s For Inclusive Growth’ asserts the if countries are to take advantage of the internet as a “source of startups” policymakers need to focus “on ensuring that internet access is widely available, affordable, and open startups and cluster innovation is one of the key means to achieve faster economic growth, and entrepreneurial startup companies are a significant source of innovation, particularly in the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector.”
According to the report, despite great global progress in “internet uptake” and enormous growth potential in internet services “a large portion of the world’s population still have no access to the internet, or their ICT skills are insufficient for them to take the full advantage of the opportunities and economic growth the internet can provide. Countries where this is the situation must take decisive action to improve it, not to further increase the digital divide gap.”
Access to “the open internet,” the report says, has created exciting new possibilities for entrepreneurs worldwide. “The internet increasingly crosses the digital divide to reach those previously excluded from economic opportunity. Not only can these new users consume what is already online, but they can also create, using the internet to improve their education, research new ideas, raise money, collaborate, and start their own companies— opportunities that would be unimaginable for them without access to the open internet,” the report says.
Beyond enabling entrepreneurial activity to shift online access the internet “can open opportunities for more inclusive growth from both a demographic and a geographic perspective.”
The report asserts that the most obvious impact of the internet for entrepreneurs has been “the creation of a whole new segment of online startups which are able to target a global market of nearly 3 billion internet users while incurring low distribution costs.” The report says, further, that “it is no surprise that many of the early large internet startups — including Netscape, eBay, Yahoo!, and Google—are located in California’s Silicon Valley.”
And according to the report, while not everyone is able to benefit from a cluster, everyone can benefit from “the new opportunities now available as many of the important inputs for startups are migrating online.” These inputs, the report adds, include “venture capital and computing capacity” as well as “mentorship and collaboration.” All of these, it says, foster innovation, making way for entrepreneurship possibilities that go “beyond the traditional boundaries of high-tech clusters to include all people in all regions that have access to an open internet.”
According to the World Economic Forum Report, greater inclusiveness of “the activity of innovation” across countries, income levels, education and gender allows for the creation of “novel enterprises” that allow new entrepreneurs to fill market gaps close to home.
Meanwhile, the report alludes to the role that access to the internet can play in the creation of open online courses that can support education, particularly in developing countries “without the restrictions of little prior education, affordability of physical distance.” Noting as well that research is another integral aspect of the background needed for innovation, the report says that “access to the open internet can provide critical background knowledge not just in developing an innovation, but also in providing the business knowledge for commercialization.”
