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Technology Transfer and ICT4D: An Interdisciplinary Literature Review
Introduction
Technology transfer has been a very researched topic in the last decades. The improvement of globalization has allowed technology to increase exponentially and thanks to this, economies have thrived. It is important to emphasize that technology comes in very different ways and one of them is knowledge. Haussmann et al. (2011) make a very interesting analysis on how knowledge has been transferred between countries. They mentioned that there are two types of knowledge: explicit and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is easy to transfer, for example, a newspaper containing yesterday’s sports results or tomorrow’s weather forecast. Meanwhile tacit knowledge, like a new manufacturing process or a new irrigation technique, is very hard to transfer. As described by Haussmann et al, the most impactful technology transfer occurs with the successful transfer of this tacit knowledge.
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is broadly accepted as a major driver of democracy, social and economic development, and organizational capacity. (Al-Gahtani, 2003) And governments around the world, especially in emerging nations, have been working to further their ICT capacity. Yet development programs in emerging nations involving ICT are rarely entirely designed and executed by the target country or population. Rather, they mostly rely on foreign aid and workers. (Ejiaku, 2014) At its heart, the field of Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) is a field dedicated to technology transfer, specifically the transfer of tacit knowledge regarding ICT. However, there is very little overlap between these two fields in academic literature.
In this literature review, our key goal is to begin bridging the gap between the two fields of Technology Transfer and ICT4D with the hopes of encouraging a shared discourse community between them.
Technology Transfer in the World
There are several examples of how technology transfer has been used in today’s world, specially in the developing world. For example, from a macroeconomic perspective Panama is a great recent example of how technology transfer has helped improve developing nations. According to Santos, Morales and Hausmann (2016) Panama is the fastest growing economy in their region and one of the fastest in the world and one of the reasons is due to the knowledge (tacit knowledge) that has been brought by immigrants and they have also helped Panamanians gain higher salaries. In another research Obach, Santos and Hausmann (2016) determined that the skills brought by these immigrants are complementary and not substitutes to those of Panamanians. From a community perspective the Villas San Pablo housing project in Barranquilla, Colombia is a another example of how technology transfer has improved poor communities. Sliwa (2017) describes how the residents of that community changed their residential homes provided by the state into commercial areas. This happened due to the lack of income generating opportunities in the area which forced the residents to seek out knowledge to gain that entrepreneurial spirit. All this process took multiple years and in reality, all this could have been speed up if the government would have acquired more knowledge from other countries and dedicated more space to the commercial area.
Technology Transfer and Foreign Direct Investment
Another important aspect that should be considered when analyzing technology transfer is foreign direct investment (FDI). Borensztein , Gregorio and Lee state “that FDI is an important vehicle for the transfer of technology, contributing relatively more to growth than domestic investment” (1998). FDI is also a key phenomenon since it is the best vehicle for multinational companies to transfer knowledge. Herzer (2017) conducted a study to analyze the effects of FDI and total factor productivity (TFP) in Bolivia. Comin (2010) defines TFP as “the portion of output not explained by the amount of inputs used in production. As such, its level is determined by how efficiently and intensely the inputs are utilized in production”. Herzer concluded that there is positive relationship between FDI and TFP or in other words the knowledge transferred by multinationals has improved Bolivia’s efficiency.
A Note on Technology Transfer and ICT4D
Before moving further into reviewing ICT4D literature, we'd like to note a key lexical difference between it and economic literature. Specifically, articles that focus on the subfield of ICT4D often use the term "Technology Transfer" to refer to a superficial, "top-down" effort to encourage the adoption of a technology or activity. This is apparent in sentences such as this one from Zewge Et all "the practice in most African countries still follows the linear model of technology transfer, in which it is assumed that innovations are developed by scientists and spread by extension workers to be adopted by farmers"(Zewge Et all, 2014). Clearly, the authors definition of technology transfer here is different from that of S.A. Ejiaku, an economist, when he writes “… the relocation of advanced technical equipment from industrialized nations to developing countries does not constitute technology transfer. … technology transfer takes place when the recipient country has corresponding technical information to enable it use the hardware in an effective and efficient manner" (Ejiaku, 2014). As part of our key goal of establishing connections between the fields of "Technology Transfer" and "ICT4D", we will be focusing and expanding upon such differences in community discourse as they arise.
Technology Transfer through ICT4D
A common goal of ICT4D literature is to see how details of a program's design and implementation affects outcomes. In the 2015 paper "Participative ICT4D and living lab research: The case study of a mobile social media application in a rural Tanzanian University setting", Baelden and Van Audenhove focus on a user-centric approach to the development of a community-oriented mobile app for Tanzanian students. Specifically, they distinguish between "pro-poor" and "per-poor" strategies, where the former develops innovations outside but targeted at poor communities, while the latter develops innovations with them. When attempting to uncover the needs of Tanzanian students, they developed a three stage research methodology that incorporated local students. Ultimately, these students helped established a ranking of their needs in order of importances. The article concludes with the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to program design. They found greater involvement in the design process required more managing of expectations, but ultimately resulted in a more effective design of a technology solution. ….
Conclusion
At first glance, these fields have a lot in common. Economists studying technology transfer seeks to understand how to strengthen economies and provide communities with more opportunities, while development researchers seek to understand more effective poverty alleviation techniques. Yet despite these similarities, in our research we found relatively few shared citations between them. In fact, of the combined XX citations of all the reviewed articles, only X overlapped across discipline lines.
All of this research mentioned previously are clear examples of technology transfer but at the end they all sum up to be the transfer of this “tacit” knowledge described by Hausmann et al. In their research, they mentioned a very good metaphor to explain this phenomenon. The transfer of knowledge is like playing scrabble. For example, a player can have letters A,C,R and they can write small words like “CAR” or “ARC” and by trading and gathering more letters from other players they will be able to write longer and more complex words and hence gain more points. The same occurs in real life, each letter is a piece of knowledge and by combining and gathering more letters communities can create more complex technologies that will allow them to thrive.
Ultimately, tacit knowledge transfer provides a perspective for ICT4D practitioners and researchers as they seek to help communities through establishing better technological knowhow.
