IT innovations for emerging markets: An opportunity for leadership

Summary form only given. We are entering an exciting era where information technology is being used in an increasingly instrumented world to make it run better. The inefficiencies in how the world operates today (e.g. in industries like transportation, energy and healthcare) have been estimated to be around $15 Trillion annually. We describe how some of these inefficiencies can be eliminated by applying analytics over data being collected in real time We introduce several unique challenges faced in emerging markets like India, for example, much larger scales of operations (for anything involving people), lower price points, and a unique environment exemplified by factors like the need to handle noisy data, low penetration of personal computers. These challenges represent an opportunity for leapfrog innovation and global leadership in those areas. We present several examples of such innovations. One of them is Spoken Web, our attempt to create a new world wide web, accessible over the (mobile) phone network, for the masses in countries like India. The Spoken Web platform facilitates easy creation of user-generated content that populates “voice sites”, allows contextual traversal of voice sites interconnected via hyperlinks based on the HyperSpeech Transfer Protocol, and provides simple search and navigation capabilities over this audio content. We present several additional examples of innovations driven by the unique needs of emerging markets. We describe areas of success as well as outstanding issues that will require further advances in computing and business model innovations to achieve truly transformational impact.