On 22 December 2016, Kim Willsher of The Guardian published an article titled “The world’s first solar panel road has opened in France.” A picture is presented to prove it! And a detailed description: it is one km long, of which 2,800 sq. m of electricity-generating panels, and it will generate enough energy to power street lighting for an entire village of 3,400 residents.
Tremendous news, of course. Which brings me to the concept of leapfrogging. If the technology to construct a road strong enough to withstand traffic and at the same time generate electricity, it is possible for us to go after this technology, leapfrogging from our backward position (we are runners!) and joining the race with the front runners. But shall we? Here in Kenya, there is a company, Strauss Energy (http://straussenergy.com/), founded by Tony Nyaga, a young man in his early 30s, which produces solar-integrated roofing tiles that generate electricity and also use compression technology to generate clean drinking water from the differential in pressure between night and day. Thus, we cannot only leapfrog in our road construction; we are also ready to leapfrog in our construction approaches.
Let me illustrate with a personal story: in 2008, when internet technologies were still very new, I was puzzled by how it was that many people could simultaneously access the same database of information, remotely, from different, distributed applications. In those days we used an ODBC connection between an application and a database, pretty much directly. Tools for connecting multiple users (client server technologies) were at their nascent stage. To cut a long story very short, trials, errors, a lot of thinking and frustrations culminated, three months later, in the creation of a simple web application, a telephone directory, connected to a database through a web server, and serving 300 employees. In about a year, we added a requisitioning interface (staff could order things from the store directly using the browser on their desktop), a time sheet submission application, even a cab requisitioning interface. And, to cap it all, we ended up controlling the way desks and sitting spaces were allocated in a company of nearly 400 members of staff. We used the advent of the internet to leapfrog our programming business from its pre-1990 days to the then new age of the internet. The tools developed ended up creating for my business an income lifeline that served us very well for many years, to the present day.
A case in point…
In 2007/08, mPesa rode on the technological developments in the telecommunications industry to leapfrog its use to include ‘banking’ and money remittances. Today, mPesa remains the most profitable unit among all of Safaricom’s income streams, and in size, it is now bigger than nearly all of the banks in Kenya together.
There are many areas in which you can apply leapfrogging: At skill level (e.g. using newer approaches to learn a new skill); information collection (learn speed reading); establishing your business niche (by adopting and perfecting better methods)…. If we master leapfrogging, at national or personal levels, we will always run with the head pack…. otherwise we will forever remain behind, followers.
Here are four suggestions as to the HOW of leapfrogging
1. Align yourself with people with futuristic ideas
2. Read, browse, research using the key words: new, future, improvement, next big thing….
3. Refine your knowledge of a definite desired improvement and commit to implement it.
4. Do. Start small. if if fails, drop the idea and move on. If it succeeds grow it.
Jordan, the very successful basket ball player put it well: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game’s winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that’s why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan
Haron Wachira 