Epicentre of tech disruption moves East

Disruption is among the most used words in the world currently. Perhaps the most misused too. Deployed to describe everything from technological changes to social upheaval, the word disruption has been best adopted by entrepreneurs.

There was a time when everyone wanted to be a creator - of wealth, value and even wellbeing. The foundations of global conglomerates in industries like automobile, construction, energy and services were seeped in ideas of creation. Political, social and business leaders wanted to create.

Now they want to disrupt. There is a bigger money on disruption today than on creation. Almost every start-up, every CEO and every investor wants to be a disruptor.

It appears that destruction will generate more riches and returns than creation. Anyone with an idea to upset an existing idea, is hailed. Anyone who clings to a successful model, is considered old fashioned. Such is the wonderful world around us.

A thoughtful effort to understand disruption was seen at the 47th edition of the annual St Gallen Symposium. Run entirely by graduate students of the St Gallen University in Switzerland, the Symposium brings together business, political and social leaders from all regions of the world. This year, the key issue was to explore the dilemma of disruption.

While disruption of many business models have improved the lives of people, there are many related issues that trouble societies. Financial technologies have allowed unimaginable ease in retail transactions. But the automation in banking services have left consumers stranded with talking bots. Like many changes, technology is creating excitement and exasperation. Such changes are not new, but its pace is breathtaking.

In some ways, we live so much in the future, eagerly accepting new developments that we have begun to revel in swift obsolescence. We abandon new concepts as swiftly as we embrace them.

At the Symposium, a clear divide was visible between the East and the West. Or the North and South, depending on where one stands. For the leaders in the developed world, an example of disruption is self-driving cars. But for many people in the developing world, an affordable and efficient mass transportation system would be disruptive. For the US and Europe, robotic surgery would be disruptive. For India and China, diagnosis of eye diseases using mobiles would transform a million lives.

At an occasion, I met many innovators from across the world. What struck me was how the successful innovators were focused on solving real life problems rooted in the local context. Some technologies like gene editing will have global impact, but most efforts will have to apply to ground realities that vary across regions.

This definition of disruption is important because investment in new ideas can't be seen only from the Western perspective. Thankfully, the world of (disruptive) entrepreneurship is as lively in the east as in the west. Some still believe that the epicenter of technology-led innovation is the Silicon Valley. The big five digital giants – Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft – were born there. This may have been the recent past, but may not be the near future.

Innovation and disruption is taking place in nearly every region of the world. Africa, Latin America, China and India boast of their own efforts of change that don't have much to do with Silicon Valley. The fact is that while Silicon Valley will remain a force for a while, many new centres of technology-led disruption are emerging swiftly. The disruption and business solutions that they create, may not amount to much from the developed world perspective. But for the regions that they live in, they are making transformative changes. M-Pesa in Africa, robots in China and digital commerce in India are allowing people to move from tech illiteracy to being tech savvy within months.

In these developing regions, disruption is creation, not destruction. Estimates suggest that more than $14 billion has been invested in Indian start-ups in the last two years. These start-ups are entering undeserved sectors, or creating services that didn't exist before.

In these regions, there is lesser of a dilemma of disruption than in the West.