Smart Technologies for Smart Nations

AUTHORS
Purnendu Mandal & John Vong

REFERENCE
http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Technologies-Nations-Perspectives-Asia-Pacif...

PREFACE

This book is about transforming economies and societies though the applications of emerging technologies and supported by a youthful population that drives rapid adoption of new technologies. The rich content of each chapter stimulates the reading of the entire book. The book chapters are drawn from the papers presented at the 2nd International Conference on Managing the Asian Century in Bali, Indonesia. The authors shared their initial work with innovators, educators, and entrepreneurs. The depth of the innovations was increased with contributions from participants and reviewers.

The book chapters are arranged around three theme areas: technologies in service industry, technologies in education and technologies in work place improvement. The service industry in ASEAN nations could benefit from new approaches to banking, tax system reform, paying attention to managers’ ethical and moral values, web-based technologies, comprehensive evaluation and measurement of productivity. In education sector, the book contributes to trends in program delivery, internship development, impacts of MOOCs, and ways to improve innovation. In the work place improvement area, the chapters deal with hospital patient scheduling, preventing work related injuries, work layout design, etc. Majority of the chapters discuss country specific developments, tools or techniques. But it is important to note that those ideas could be generalized across many nations in Asia Pacific region.

The impact of the book three-fold. Firstly, the readers can almost sense that these technologies allow nations, who are willing and able, to employ and apply the same technologies to have trajectory push for greater economic and societal development. An advanced economy may use the smart technologies for greater economic growth and productivity. An emerging economy may apply smart technologies to leapfrog into an advanced economy.

Secondly, the book is about providing better access to health, education and financial services through smart technologies. It is long suspected that these three sectors define the level of economic productivity. It is highly improbable that an economy can improve its productivity where its citizens are not skilled and cannot get access to vocational education that can upgrade their skills. Similarly a nation will not be productivity when its population is devastated by disease and there is little means to access health services. Again the economic growth of many emerging markets have been stunted for lack of access to basic financial services.

Finally, the book should be compulsory reading for all emerging markets and developing countries. It should inspire governments and public policies to embark on using smart technologies for faster economic development and greater productivity. It would give guidance for enterprises and entrepreneurs alike to launch into techno-space in pursuit of economic efficiency.

We wish all the readers take heed from the rich ideas found in this book. At the end, if technology start-ups can draw motivation, inspiration, and provocation from the ideas, then this book would have achieved its purpose.

We acknowledge contributions of many individuals to the success of this book. Teja Roop, our Research Assistant, worked tirelessly for timely submission of manuscripts to the publisher. He managed the review process, kept track of ongoing correspondences with authors, and more importantly kept us on publication schedule. We acknowledge the efforts of reviewers to uphold the quality of book chapters. The Springer publishing team did an excellent job in pushing it through fast publishing. We appreciate the hard work William Achauer and his team put up in bringing this high quality publishing.