Final Essay Selections

Before delving into my potential final essay selections, it is important I provide some background information in order to make the methodology behind my essay selections clearer. This will also help to put my thought process in context. I spent the last three and half years working for a Technology and Strategy consulting firm headquartered in Mclean, Virginia, located in the District of Columbia metropolitan area. While there, I engaged in evaluating and assessing advanced and emerging technologies in complex environments. This sparked my interest in the actual transfer of technology on an international scale. Thus, my essay selections are based upon the concept of ‘technology transfer’ in the context of international development.

I’m exploring essay topics related to transferring technologies between institutions. Technology can be objects, activities, processes, systems, etc. The concept of technology transfer can be defined as the transfer of a body of knowledge from one location to another. The regions of particular interest to me are as follows:

 Middle East (countries: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar)
 India (states: Maharashtra, New Delhi and Goa)
 Southeast Asia (countries: Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam)

I believe the Middle East is extremely underdeveloped due to cultural norms that the West find difficult to operate within or around. Pursuing a topic regarding the Middle East would shed light on the operating model for technology transfer in which cultural norms are highly valued. On the other end of the spectrum is India, a country which has enjoyed a steady flow of development over the last decade but is still plagued with infrastructure growing pains. Exploring an ICT case study revolving around India will allow me to examine the successes and failures of implementing technologies in an environment which has sufficient enough infrastructure in certain respects, but hold communal beliefs that are sometimes a deterrent. In regards to Southeast Asia, the local cultural and the business norms are unknown to me. Studying technology transfer in the region would be instrumental in providing me a framework for understanding the socio-economic, political, and cultural dynamics. Regardless of the region, I’m interested in learning more about the nuances surrounding technology transfer in the context of international development.

Mapping heritage in times of complexity

In this week’s post I’ll share some insights into my current sphere of academic interest and briefly introduce you to several key concepts of prospective essay for this course.

Scholars deriving from greatly refined areas of applied math and microfinance suggest that a new method of analysis could be introduced to development practitioners.

Authors suggest that there are rather new ways of tackling complexity, largely emanating from the two fields of complexity science and cognitive science.

Deriving from systematic methods of thinking, complexity science reveals that complex aspects of reality are best analyzed as whole systems that can only be understood by examining the deeply-imbedded, non-linear interrelationships of the system’s parts (Weaver 1967, Tapscott 2008).

Modern day cognitive science reveals that our minds evolved to think not with a systems mindset, but to rely on simple, linear, cause-effect modeling that served our ancestors well but is inadequate for grappling with modern public policy issues. Therein lies the source of our intellectual immaturity: the mismatch between how complex things work and the simple cognitive methods we use to understand them. Our increasingly interconnected and interdependent world cannot be described with our default preference for clear, black and white solutions.

As development discourse requires multiple perspectives, a variety of possible explanations and constant testing and retesting of hypotheses before it is safe to draw any conclusions.

Firstly, building on concepts deriving from of complex adaptive systems theories as well as referring to authors like Weaver (1967), Dichter (2003), Ramaligam (2011) etc. my work can be best described as humble attempt to examine possible impact of audio-visual heritage centers operating in developing countries within the framework of complex adaptive systems theory.

In my writing I will also discuss how such institutions were established, what were implications and incentives for different origins of this type of institutions. Additionally, I will also look more in depth how such institutions function in a countries gradually recovering after long term conflict.

In this writing I will look more profoundly to relations existing between all involved actors and analyse how such relations could be modified or extended in order to generate profit or create more beneficial forms of collaboration. 

Also I will offer recommendations how to sustain and develop such institutions,  propose business models that will allow such institutions evolve to other stages of performance.