Will innovation follow the internet boom in RI?

We are currently witnessing a rapid growth in Internet users in Indonesia. Propelled by the availability of 3G technology reaching more and more areas, the decreasing price of personal computers and the advent of smart phones, an increasing number of Indonesians are getting online.
Observing this phenomenon, we cannot help but ask whether this surge in internet usage will lead to a growth in web innovation. Will we begin seeing Indonesian internet companies appearing with their creative inventions and wowing the world with the next Facebook, Google, or Amazon?
All it takes is some whiz kids with computers and internet access to cook up something in their garage right?
Maybe not.
The belief that talented youngsters are driving the wave of internet innovation may have been true in some cases, but is actually far more romanticized than actually true. There are other factors we should pay heed to.
First, it’s about hard work, not talent.
Geoff Colvin wrote in his book (aptly titled Talent is Overrated) that what separates the best performers from the rest is not talent. It’s hard work, in the form of rigorous and deliberate training. In other words, nobody is born to be a golfer, a ballerina or a computer programmer.
They are made, not born.
So there are no “whiz kids”, as such. What we call whiz kids are really those who from an early age began immersing themselves in hobbies such as golf, tennis or computers and simply practiced continuously until they began close to expert at them.
What quantifies hard work? What constitutes rigorous, and how long do we need to work at it before we can reach our full potential? Malcolm Gladwell put the magic number at 10,000 hours, basically meaning you could be good at anything (sport, music, art, etc.) if you practiced around 3 hours every day for 10 years. This is how Bill Gates, Tiger Woods and many others became who they are today.
It is extremely hard work and to succeed you need to start at a very early age, which is why not many people make the cut.
However, this is also good news. With the spread of internet access and low cost computers, we can expect more children to spend many hours learning and experimenting with their computers. The more time they spend learning, the better they become.
Another important factor is proximity to best brains.
Google was born when its innovators, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, were students at Stanford University. This is the same university that produced Yahoo, HP and Silicon Graphics. In the beginning, when the Google founders needed money to start their company, it was Andy Bechtolsteim who wrote the first check.
True, it was the innovation behind Google that made it so successful. But that is not all. Without the support from the people around them, the story might have ended up differently. Would Brin and Page have been able to create Google if they went to the University of Indonesia instead of Stanford and lived in Depok instead of Silicon Valley?
Proximity to other innovators provides ideas with the chance to flourish no matter how outrageous they may seem. There is a reason why many of the best ideas were coined in academic environments: It is where crazy ideas are conjured, encouraged and challenged, but not dismissed.
If we want to unlock the next great internet innovation, the best place to look is in our universities. Do our students have a place to discuss their creative ideas, no matter how strange they may seem at first? Do they have the right people to discuss it with, who encourage and challenge them to develop their ideas further? Do the universities provide them with the facilities to immerse themselves, experimenting day and night to see what works and what does not?
Third, talking about facilities brings us to the next crucial point, infrastructure.
How can we expect Indonesians to come up with the next “big thing” when we experience blackouts on a regular basis? How can we expect the birth of the next killer-application if our internet connection is unstable and slow?
Four, English ability. From time to time, I receive emails from students asking technical questions about programming when the answer to their questions are mostly at the tip of their fingers if they bother to search for it on the internet. When I mentioned this fact, the excuse provided is always that the information is written in English.
After going through all the points above, we arrive at the question of whether or not it is realistic to expect any real innovation to come from Indonesia. Can we really catch up in a very short amount of time?
The answer is yes.
Technology changes with time. The good thing about information technologies is that they develop at a rapid pace. New technologies appear and old ones fade away, so that from time to time we are at the same starting point as the rest of the world. There is no excuse for being left behind.
The internet is a level playing field. Many new technologies, especially in software, are now available as open source, or in other words are freely available. Those with little money will not necessarily be at a disadvantage. Everybody can use this software, take it apart and study it, or build something on top of it at virtually no cost.
We do not have to be the first. History has shown that it is not who is first that counts. It is who is the best at whatever they are doing. Google was not the first search engine, Firefox not the first web browser, Facebook not the first social networking site. Just because we do not come first does not mean we cannot be the best at it.
We have a large pool of young people, the age group most likely to coin the next great internet innovation. Out of 100 internet startups, we will be lucky to see 10 of them make it. Someone who is middle aged, married with kids and has many other responsibilities probably will not venture to work on something that will fail 90 percent of the time.
Riwanto Megosinarso

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