Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Monday, September 27, 2004Deeshaa: Directions for India's Development
Services, unlike tangible goods such as wheat or TV sets, don't always travel well. Consider home construction, massage therapy, and dentistry. If you want any of those services, you're likely to shop locally. On the other hand, some information-intensive services that benefit from economies of scale - in the financial services sector, for example - have localized in places such as New York, London, Chicago (derivatives), and San Francisco (venture capital).
In an economy that is increasingly composed of services, the tradeability of services seems kind of important to those of us who live in the middle of nowhere. After all, we don't have too many people to trade with locally, which kind of puts a damper on the growth potential of our firms.
I'm not the first to recognize that even where services are tradeable, they are subject to the logic and economic discipline of comparative advantage. If we want to grow valuable businesses out here on the economic frontier, we need to understand how we are going to develop and maintain competitive productivity.
Consequently, I frequently find myself doing Google searches on terms such as "rural economic development," "comparative advantage," and "productivity" in order to try to make sense of the world in which I've chosen to live. One such search turned up references to Pondering Outsourcing: Part Duh and Is Outsourcing Good for the Universe - blogs by Atanu Dey of Deeshaa Ventures, "an entrepreneurial institution designed to transform the rural Indian economy."
An hour of browsing Atanu's web site and blog convinced me to (a) subscribe to the Deeshaa weblog, (b) add it to my Blogroll, and (c) recommend it to y'all. I expect to learn a thing or two. You might, too.
Related: Cost and Productivity Tradeoffs
