New Technology for Energy Savings - Why Bangalore?

New technology innovation and adoption can sometimes happen faster in a developing economy - it has the economic support for investment in new infrastructure because current infrastructure is poor and/or expensive.

This topic came up a few weeks back, at a seminar I gave at Stanford about the economics of innovation. The example I used to make the point is for a technology I am intimately familiar with - the HPLabs "Smart" Data Center. It is a data center cooling technology that can cut down energy use by 40-50%. You would think HP would be debut this technology in an expensive place like Palo Alto, Right?- but no- HP has released it first in Bangalore, India - Why?

Because in Bangalore, just like in other big cities in India, with its poor infrastructure and intermittent power supply, you get data center up time of 24/7 by supplementing grid electricity with diesel burning generators - which is expensive - more so than grid electricity in PA. And so economically it makes more sense to refine/test it there. Additional benefits of course are emissions reduction etc.

So the lesson is - if you have great technology, and it does not seem economically feasible to innovate further in a developed economy, with its good, cheap, reliable infrastructure, try it in an emerging economy - there will be economic as well as environmental incentives, i.e. a double bottom line. For details -check out the Businessweek article.