DEVELOPMENT OR DIPLOMACY ?????

Take the words Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Does this sound like an easy recipe for an underdeveloped economy to follow? All that it must do to telescope with a few years the scores  of years it took us to develop. Go abroad and copy more efficient methods, put them into effect at  home, then sit back and wait for extra products to roll in. Of course, it doesn’t quite work that  way. People in the underdeveloped countries know this from bitter experience.
Yet the same  illusion keeps cropping up among the so-called advanced countries.
 Too often, we think we can  send a few technical experts to a poor country to solve its problems. Occasionally, in connection  with a particular technological process, experts have indeed been able to work wonders in this  facile way. But such luck is exceptional. Experience shows development is truly a hard and slow process but not an impossible one. To hasten its evolution, spontaneous entrepreneurship and innovation must develop among the peoples directly involved. The emphasis is on creative innovation, because it is by no means a cut and dried task to adopt advanced foreign technology to an underdeveloped country’s own use. It may be recalled, that the advanced technology was itself developed to meet the special conditions of the advanced countries. These conditions include high money wage rates, labours scarce in number but replete with industrial skills; plentiful capital inherited from the past, mass production, and so forth. These conditions do not prevail in less developed lands. This task of creative innovation is of one for undiluted rugged individualism. The government can do much to set up extension services in each region for consulting with farmers on the best seeds, methods of cultivation, and implements. By sponsoring vocational schools, and training courses in machine methods -and book keeping too – the government itself can innovate creativity. Somewhere between laissez-faire and totalitarianism each developing nation has to word out its own destiny.