TWC Session 3: Technology & Industrial Development/Technology & Innovation Management

For the large part of TWC lesson this week, the highlight was on industrialisation, and most importantly sustainability of industrialisation. From the records of history, industrialisation is a pathway for countries to develop. Most of the developed countries today had went through industrialisation at one point or another. Why is the effect of industrialisation so important? Briefly speaking, industrialisation helps to provide employment, helps to attract foreign investments, helps to increase the country's GDP and therefore this can help to improve the infrastructure of the country. This is in fact the catalyst for development in any country. Thus to answer Yali's, can we tell him to just move into industrialisation?

This leads us to the next segment of the lesson. We talked about the effects of industrial development and the effects on the world. Just by industrialisation, it is not enough. Imagine all the African nations moving into industrialisation, imagine all of them industrialising as heavily as China, the world will probably become a very harsh environment to live in. As such, we need to innovate and come up with sustainable industrialisation. In other words, development that is responsible to the environment.

Traditionally, countries industrialise through the linear approach. This means that raw materials are extracted, the product is being manufactured, lastly the waste is dumped. So in all stages of this approach, sustainability is never on the companies' agenda. The effect of environmental degradation seems to be non of their business.

Every single step in this linear approach leads to disaster, right from the start. Through extraction of raw materials, the area of the forest around the world is declining at a staggering rate, destroying natural habitats for millions of wildlife. Increase in food demand is also causing over-fishing in many parts of the world. The raw materials are then transported to factories for processing. These factories create tons and tons of harmful waste into our environment daily, polluting our air and our water sources. After the consumption of the products, dumping occurs. Hectares and hectares of landfills are being fed with continuous supply of non biodegradable materials, causing serious land pollution. Therefore this form of industrialisation is definitely not the right way to go.

Al Gore's movie, "The Inconvenient Truth", highlights how these industrial activities can lead to severe consequences. The Earth's homeostatic reactions can be seen clearly nowadays and this is a strong signal to us–our Earth is ill, we have to change our ways.

Another interesting part of the lesson is no doubt the video on "Story of Stuff". As quoted from the video, "if everyone consumes like the United States, we will need 4 to 5 planets". As developing countries are beginning to industrialise, this is a phenomenon that we need to avoid. The video also talked about the issue of corporations against the government. More often than not, the governments are more interested in pacifying corporations for economic benefits, sometimes at the expense of environmental degradation. Though everyone plays a part in conservation of environment and embracing sustainability, the government definitely has more influence to make changes and thus i feel the leaders should take the lead for a sustainable future.

As more people see the need to move from a linear approach to a cyclical approach, more and more countries are moving towards sustainable industrialisation. However, this shift towards sustainability requires intensive R & D which requires heavy funding. This is a problem for developing countries because some countries struggle to even fill the stomachs of their citizens, where do they get the funds to develop sustainability? Therefore it is not sufficient that the developed countries embrace sustainable development, it is important they bring this technologies to less developed countries. This is one clear message brought out by the first article regarding European Union and their fight for sustainability. 

I feel that this lesson is very closely related to my personal review paper and thus found it very interesting. I would give it a rating of 9/10.