Research, Development, and Innovation in Extremadura

Abstract

For forty years information and communication technologies (ICT) together with the internet have been reshaping daily life. The criticisms of electronic luddites find it difficult to influence the fait acompli of ICT transformations. In the contemporary world it is assumed that technological competence plus the free market equals progress. There are simply no alternatives. The economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) distinguished invention from innovation. Invention is constituted by technological change alone, but innovation requires the successful marketing of an invention by adapting it to the marketplace. Not all inventions enter society simply on the basis of their utility. But should market forces alone direct innovation, with governments having no role except to favor or criticize already circulating developments? The response to this question must acknowledge two basic points: First, any technology represents also a political choice. second, ICT are creating something beyond simple economic benefit. They are producing a new culture or what some have called cyberculture. It is true that politics and culture cannot be completely designed in advance. There are always elements of uncertainty. Interactions of intention and contingency generate different experiences. But can we expect diversity in the information society as it arises solely from the market? Should we not try to promote models appropriate to different political and cultural realities? Can we harmonize different models of information society and have a shared arena for different experiences? If the answers are "Yes," then we should try to imagine an array of models instead of one unique information society. But in an increasingly globalized society it is difficult to think in pluralistic terms. A single market combined with just one form of technology does not promote the imagining of diversity. Telecommunications, the internet, and a global market imply a homogeneous or uniform realm. Nevertheless, some observers see such diversity emerging. Pekka Himannen (2001) and Manuel Castells analyze the Finnish model to reveal an alternate information society in a disappearing welfare state managed by private corporations. The Basque model (Andoni Alonso and Izaki Arzoz, 2003) provides another example-as does the autonomous region of Extremadura in western Spain, which is one of the most interesting examples of ICT innovation promoted by political initiative in Europe. Information Society: Open or Closed? According to most commentators, ICTs are primarily a means for economic development. Nicholas Negroponte (1996) wrote some years ago about the new digital paradigm that transforms atoms into bytes; commodities should be translated into information. Bill Gates (1999) considers the internet the largest shopping mall on earth, one in which economics and competence are perfected because all frictions vanish (mediators disappear so prices reach an absolutely fair level). Indeed, many economists see United States economic growth during the 1990s as a result of implementing the internet and other computer tools able to boost productivity. This was a lesson that European technocrats took very seriously and the Fifth European Community Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration (1998-2002) had as one of its goals promoting a new European economy based in ICTs. ICTs may power the economy, but this is not all they do. In the apt description of Chris Hables Gray (2002), the Internet has a military past, an anarchist present, and a free-market future. Yet insofar as past is prologue, there is no need to take the future as determined. The fact that ICTs have had different cultural configurations should encourage us to think of alternatives in what might be. Economics, politics, and culture are sometimes conflicting forces seeking to shape ICT, and there is no reason to presume that one relationship between these factors has priority. …