The untold stories of a generation of pioneers who brought the mobile revolution to global majorities worldwide
Far more than a phone, today's mobile is a powerful handheld computer embedded within a global communications network—and accessible to nearly everyone, everywhere. Achieving technological inclusion at this scale required both science-based inventions and opportunity-seeking innovations; the structure of standards and the adaptability of startups; the resources of the world's greatest corporate research lab and the persistence of a generation of entrepreneurs.
Philip Auerswald relates the epic tale of the mobile phone's transformation from an inaccessible urban luxury to an indispensable global necessity. The book conveys the untold stories of determined innovators who brought the mobile revolution worldwide. Collectively, their work has had a decisively greater impact on the lives of most people on the planet than the activities of Silicon Valley titans usually featured in the books that line airport bookshelves. In the stories of these market pioneers, we see replicable processes for bringing frontier technologies to excluded populations by combining tenacity with empathy and creative foresight.
A Phone Is a Cow will draw readers in with the patterns that connect history, economics, technology, sociology, ethics, and daily lived experience—and provide a richer understanding of the long-term trends that matter most.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Bengt Holmström
Preface
Introduction: The Origins of the Mobile Revolution
Prologue: Mohishkhola
Part I The Cellular Concept
1. Mothers of Invention
2. Birth of an Industry
Part II Connectivity Is Productivity
3. Trouble in River City
4. Private Equity
5. A Phone Is a Cow
6. Standards
7. Incumbent Advantage
Part III Market Pioneers
8. Illumination
9. Facing Down Mugabe
10. Digital Dividends
Part IV Carrying Out New Combinations
11. Innovation as Search
12. Mobilizing Finance
13. The LEGO Theory of Development
14. "What Hath God Wrought!"
Conclusion: "We Are Just Starting"
Epilogue: Bangladesh 2024
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Reviews
"A Phone Is a Cow is a refreshingly upbeat story with an important moral about the indispensable role that connection, information, and imagination play in human development. At a moment when technology threatens to transform every aspect of our lives, often for the worse, Auerswald shows us how humans can still control our tools, rather than allowing our tools to control us."—Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO, New America, and Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University
"Philip E. Auerswald's A Phone Is a Cow is the best and most current treatment of the mobile phone revolution and how it has benefitted people around the entire world."—Tyler Cowen, professor of economics, George Mason University, and author of The Complacent Class
About the Author
Philip E. Auerswald is a professor at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government; cofounder and coeditor of the journal Innovations; and the founding board chair and president of the National Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He has written numerous books, including The Coming Prosperity: How Entrepreneurs Are Transforming the Global Economy (2012).
Bengt Holmström, a Finnish economist and Nobel Laureate, is the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
