Nobody in The World Does it Like That – Nobody in the World Has Problems Like Ours

One of my favourite movies is a Bollywood flick called 3 Idiots, which tells the story of three college friends. One them turns out to be a brilliant mind called Phunsukh Wangdu, who invents a host of gadgets in a remote part of India. Not only did this movie made me laugh throughout, it also gave me a sense of happiness to see the simple Mr. Wangdu coming up triumphant against someone who had become a corporate big shot.

It turns out that the character of Phunsukh Wangdu was based on a real person, an inventor called Sonam Wangchuk, who is from the Ladakh, the Indian State which shares a border with Tibet. Mr. Wangchuk has essentially become famous for building a campus run entirely on renewable energy and a technique of storing fresh water using artificial glaciers. More on Mr. Wangchuk and his inventions can be found at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonam_Wangchuk_(engineer)

Mr. Wangchuk is what I’d call one of the best things to emerge in the science of development. He’s a local innovator, who creates solutions that are unique to a particular region. If you look at Mr. Wangchuk’s two key inventions, you will notice that they were perfect for the Himalayan region. Who else but someone who grew up in that part of the world could have come up with solutions for the issues faced by that part of the world?

While I believe that globalization has on balance been a positive force, there has been one major flaw. It’s worked on the assumption that what is good for the Western (mainly American) world has been good for the developing world. This has been clearly seen in business where global business has come to mean American multinationals and it’s also happened in the area of development – one only has to visit any given developing country to witness the number of “development” agents from Western NGOs hanging around.

This is not a bad thing in as much as both multinationals and NGOs do provide capital and training for the local population. I think of Singapore, a small island that has managed to achieve economic maturity within a generation. Part of our success has been due to the fact that our economy is built by multinationals and our people and businesses are placed in a situation where “best in Singapore” is not acceptable – you have to be best in the world.

There is however, one problem. When you get solutions from elsewhere, they don’t always in the local context and finding a solution to the solution ends up becoming a very expensive process for all parties involved. Business is many examples of how failing to take into account of the local context has failed. Ford forgot that locals in South America are Spanish speaking rather than English speaking. Hence, the launch of the Ford Nova was a failure. Who wants to buy a car called “No Go” (direct translation of Nova from Spanish). Closer to home, international burger chains found themselves getting beating in the Philippines because they didn’t adapt to local taste and got a kicking by the local player, Jollibee.

When this happens in business, its merely a case of the business failing to make the money they hopped they’d make. It’s a little more serious when it comes to development agencies and NGOs. When the foreign solution fails, the development agencies and NGOs ask for and get more money. However, the locals don’t see their lives improving. Hence, the common criticism of development agencies being that they only develop the employees of the development agencies.

Home grown solutions provided by the likes of Mr. Wangchuk tend to be more effective in the goal of helping the local community. The reason is simple, they understand the local context such as what the local communities will accept, the local geography and the available resources. I read an interview by Mr. Wangchuk who argued that his home province of Ladakh did not need the industrialization as the rest of India. The interview can be found at:

 https://www.theweek.in/news/sci-tech/2019/11/30/the-planet-doesnt-need-money-needs-behavioural-change-sonam-wangchuk.html?fbclid=IwAR3HsZRkpJG2MlOegFuoVnLtaLl3rAR1F2hd4RjsoXwCJ5OW642FNIwevCs

Once again, I am by no means rejecting the role of the outside world in developing and creating prosperity. It’s vital for the world to be interconnected if it prospers. However, the most effective solutions cannot be imposed on a community because they worked elsewhere. The cost-effective ones are inevitably developed from the ground up by the people who understand the ground and aided by people with the skills to execute no matter where they come from.

My nation of Singapore has been thus far successful with imported solutions. However, we’re discovering that as the economy matures, we need a different way of solving problems. How do we do that? The answer is clearly to look to the people who understand what’s going on.

It will take time for a culture of encouraging home-grown innovation to develop, especially when the old method of importing solutions worked so well. I think of a local inventor who once developed something for our water utility. The civil servants told him, “Nobody else in the world does it the way you’ve proposed.” His reply was “Nobody else in the world has water issues like ours.” This is an answer that we need to apply to the way we do things if we are to encourage the development of necessary home grown innovation.

Teaching Asians to Think

Just saw a letter in the Straits Times Forum page entitled “Time ripe for a pan-Asian university,” which argues that in light of the blame game for the “Covid-19” and growing anti-Chinese sentiment (which affects non-China Chinese) in the West, it was time for Asians to produce a “Pan-Asian University.” The letter can be found at:

https://www.straitstimes.com/forum/letter-of-the-week-time-ripe-for-a-pan-asian-university

This letter also reminded me of a talk I attended that was conducted by Her Excellency, Ms. Kara Owen, the High Commissioner of the United Kingdom, a few months ago (back in the pre-Circuit Breaker days). In that talk, the High Commissioner acknowledged that Singapore had sent many students to the UK and said that she hoped that there would be more student interaction between the UK and Singapore with more UK students heading to study in Singapore.

Interestingly enough, the topic of universities is one of the classic cases of Westerners having more confidence in the future of Asia than Asians. I remember telling someone of South Asian decent what the British High Commissioner had said and his only reaction was “She must be mad, why would they want to come here when they have the best universities there.” This reaction is, sadly, not a lone one. As far as most Asians are concerned, the world’s best education remains Western.

To an extent, this is true. If you look at rankings of the world’s best universities, they are, with the exception of Oxford and Cambridge, inevitably American. A look at the Times Higher Education Ranking can be found at:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/best-universities/best-universities-world

These rankings are pretty entrenched and if you look at the normal Asian mindset, unlikely to change anytime soon. I look at Singapore as the prime example. We invest heavily in education. We are proud of our universities and we spend a lot of money on them. Yet, despite all our pride in our home-grown universities, our country is inevitably run by people who went to Oxbridge for a first degree and did an MBA in an American University.

There are of course, reasons for the dominance of Western Universities in the top ranks of the world’s best. For all the apparent issues with Western societies (think social unrest on American streets at the moment), they remain societies that are open to free expression and more importantly the free flow of ideas. America in particular has rolled out the welcome mat for the world’s best brains and allowed them to flourish. Furthermore, as in the case of America, there is a culture that encourages experimentation. Part of that culture includes a tolerance for failure, which remains an anathema to many Asian societies

For many Asian governments, there is also prestige in having people trained by the world’s best. Here in Singapore, we take pride in the fact that our top people have not just proven themselves at home but in world-renown places like Harvard, Cambridge and so on. Governments in places like China have also done the same.

Having said all that, the question remains – why can’t Asia produce a world-class university and why can’t we accept the idea that people from the West might want to come to study in this part of the world.

The economics are certainly making Asia a more attractive place to be. For all it’s faults, China is the world’s second largest and most dynamic economy and other Asian countries are also following suite. Business interest in the West has certainly become more focused on Asia. I remember, when Ogilvy hired Tham Khai Meng as its global creative head. While the local media made a song and dance about the first Singaporean to be a global creative head of a major ad agency, there was also another person who got promoted, which was Miles Young, who became CEO. Mr. Young cut his teeth in Asia-Pacific.

A major ad agency thought it was important to fill its key positions with people with Asian experience because it saw that this was where the future consumers would be. However, are Asians being more than just copycats of a Western Mind?

Developing a great university would be the right start to proving that the answer is no. There are positive signs. I think of John Chambers, former CEO of Cisco Systems singing the praise of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). I think of the efforts of Singapore’s Universities to create a start up system in the same way that Stanford did around Silicon Valley (as a matter of disclosure, I am working for NTU’s start up and commercialization arm and I have worked for the IIT Alumni).

However, more needs to b done. Asian societies will need to encourage greater innovation, which means a culture that allows experimentation, failure and questioning of established rules. The money is there to spend on research but cultures need to match. Think of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), which has the full financial backing of Saudi Aramco, the world’s most profitable company. The facilities are wonderful and its hired famous names but has the culture created innovation and great research?  

Admittedly, I didn’t shine in university but if you look at what universities do, you’ll see that they are the bedrock of producing an innovative and prosperous economy. America has ruled the world in just about every sphere. It has most of the world’s best research universities. Surely that cannot be a coincidence. Instead of sending students there, most Asian governments could do well to ask what makes American universities so good and to replicate it within. There’s no reason why there can’t be a great Asian university.