دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله نقش استراتژیک خوداتکائی تکنولوژیک در مدیریت توسعه (نشریه الزویر 1999)

نقش راهبردی خوداتکائی تکنولوژیکی در مدیریت توسعه

Strategic Role of Technological Self-Reliance in Development Management

Abstract

Thanks to technological advancements, every society — throughout the world — is now better off than before. Although this is true for all societies considered in an aggregate manner, within each society and between different societies, the relative gaps in prosperity are increasing. Reversing these gaps is the most important challenge for human development in the twenty-first century. A thorough scrutiny of the causes for the observed negative trends would indicate that technological gap is at the root of all. Success stories clearly tell us that technological capacity building is the best foundation for any meaningful economic growth that leads to a higher standard of living and greater prosperity for the citizens of a country. Moreover, technology-based creative problem solving and the ability to manage technological innovation are essential prerequisites for the success of contemporary business executives operating in the competitive globalized market environment. Paying attention to these lessons is the call of the day for any developing country government as well as for the business executives of that country. This article discusses the strategic role of technological self-reliance in development management, in terms of what we have learned so far and where we should be going, so as to reverse the widening technological capacity gap between the developed and developing countries.

I. Introduction

World Development Report 1998/99 of the World Bank proposes that we look at the problems of development in a new way — from the perspective of knowledge [1]. The report states that: Poor countries — and poor people — differ from rich ones not only because they have less capital but also because they have less knowledge. And indeed, even greater than the knowledge gap is the gap in the capacity to create knowledge. The World Bank Report goes on to suggest that expanding telecommunications hold the promise to improve every developing country’s capacity to absorb knowledge. Incidentally, back in 1987, there was a special issue of the Technological Forecasting and Social Change journal focusing on “Technological Capability Assessment in Developing Countries: A Discussion on Rationale and Possible Approaches” [2]. It was observed then that the crucial gap between the developed and the developing nations was a technological one. Clearly, the difference between the rich and poor societies may be money, but the difference between developed and under-developed societies is in fact technological capacity. Even now, many developing countries may be rich in some ways (for example, in terms of natural resource endowment, culture, etc.), but they are indeed very poor in technology.