Discussion

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Researchers on technology diffusion make a credible case for the need to look beyond the current technology to support systems — educational, governmental, and cultural — that can make the innovation succeed. The figures gathered by the United Nations Development Programme show just how marginal these support systems are in the nine countries they have identified. Clearly any business in these countries will have significant hurdles to cross to participate in global e-commerce. Yet a specific count of web sites in the nine selected nations shows that individual businesses have not given up. They are looking actively for ways to grow their business and gain foreign markets. They have found ways of keeping costs down and ways of circumventing local infrastructure shortcomings. Yet this survey shows they are finding only limited success.

A review of the product choice these companies are selecting for sale over the web finds that digital goods and services greatly outnumber tangible goods. Additionally, the tangible products being advertised seem to be particularly difficult to sell over this medium. It would appear that exporting companies and their government supporters should give some thought to the product mix they are presenting for sale. Just as the dot com bubble in the US represented serious misunderstandings about what products could be successfully sold over the web, businesses in the marginal countries of the world appear to be following down the same failed path.

Given the obvious effort companies in these nations are willing to make to improve their sales, it would appear that they should consider two strategies for successful e-commerce. The first strategy is the one already being employed by companies that are using the web to sell digital products. Hotels, resorts, vacation sites and travel agents are already using the web to support tourism in these countries. This strategy seems to be in concert with what we know works over this medium.

A second strategy is one that none of these countries appear to be employing at this time — the sale of digital services. The research of Davis, McMaster and Nowak (2002) provides a checklist for support needed to successfully enter the IT-enabled business services industry. Jobs such as keyboarding, text entry, transcription, data processing and contact centers all can be performed with minimal skills and at significant competitive advantage to those countries — or portions of countries — that can provide the necessary social, legal, and technical infrastructure. As noted earlier in this paper, none of these countries has all of the national infrastructure needed to fully compete, but as we also saw, individual companies can do very creative things to leverage the small amount of talent and capital they can accumulate.

Additional research is crucial. One place to start would be with infrastructure. As this study found, many businesses have bypassed local web service weaknesses by hosting overseas. While that is a short-term solution to one infrastructure problem, it does not address problems with shipping. For governments that are not corrupt, are there models available that would suggest the optimal approach these governments could use to speed shipping through local ports and airports? In countries that will not change their practices, are there avenues available to businesses to at least reduce the competitive disadvantages they face?

Another aspect of infrastructure that is frequently mentioned as important is education, but there is little literature on university departments in LDCs that are having an impact in this area. As a former professor of Computer Science at the University of Namibia, I found that local companies were very open to working with university faculty, but there seemed to be much less applied research engagement than is often the case in the US and elsewhere. Research identifying models for such interaction would be useful.

The fact that businesses were often getting very low numbers of "hits" on their web sites reminds us that companies in LDCs share the same problem as all companies — visibility. In a study of e-commerce activity in Ethiopia, Lake (2000) noted that much of the success some companies there were having was based on the fact that some Ethiopian artists have international reputations, and so getting their work noticed was less difficult. Companies just developing an international awareness and international-quality goods, could be greatly helped by research that provided models of companies that were able to successfully make the move to the international stage.

Lastly, we still need much more work identifying the products or product categories that can be sold successfully around the world. This research may have to be done by national bodies as they identify niche products that can be promoted globally. In the meantime, it is a serious waste of effort for fifty Pashmina vendors in Nepal to all find out independently that selling such sweaters over the Internet may not be a possibility.

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