Many of the world's greatest problems don't need vast investments to solve them. Sometimes relatively simpler, cheaper solutions are faster and more effective.
Take communications in the third world. If you've travelled some of the backblocks of Asia you will know how unreliable the phones can be. The rich world spent a century and countless billions in cash creating the telephone network we have grown up with. It's a world grid built from telecom pits and billions of tons of copper, to satellites and trans-ocean cables. How are the poorest countries in the world, like Haiti or Samoa, ever going to catch up?
Well I wrote about the answer seven years ago, and now I've taken another look to see whether the ideas have proved as brilliant as they appeared. Yes, they are working.
Fourteen years ago controversial Irish communications entrepreneur Denis O'Brien bought the mobile phone rights for Jamaica. He immediately built hundreds of phone towers throughout the island and virtually gave away mobile phones to any peddler or farmer who asked. In 100 days he had distributed 100,000 phones. He then played the same routine on Haiti, Grenada, Barbados and most of the Caribbean islands, then Fiji, Tonga, Papua New Guinea and across the Pacific.
All these countries could never afford a conventional telephone system. Yet mobiles jump right over the copper mountains and now every yam farmer or reef fisherman could afford the few dollars a month for their phone cards. They are now in modern business.
Take this unconventional attitude to our many other pressing problems. How is the world going to defeat deadly carbon pollution and climate change? Well a few months ago I started writing about Elon Musk and his better battery. Suddenly the other papers and TV stations have picked up the news. Eventually even our politicians may listen. You don't need millions in nuclear power plants or coal generators. Panels on the roof, windmills on the hills and batteries in the homes and sub-stations, will do the job. It just needed time for science to notch up the capacities, but that's happening now.
More public transport is the answer to our slow traffic and jammed roads. We don't want diesel buses or more freeways creating pollution. But solar roofs and Tesla-type battery technology can simplify trains, trams and buses and get rid of the smog and those overhead wires.
Just a couple of years ago, my colleagues would be ringing the funny farm, for writing such science fiction in a serious newspaper. But already you have seen so much rapid progress and development that you know you can't laugh it off any more.
In your business, look out for the simple solutions. Like the changes that Uber and its like have made to the taxi industry. Or the way that Airbnb has transformed the travel-and-hotel business. They are spin-offs from the computer and mobile phone advances - simple. Yet revolutionary.
