Today we are witnessing a true change of era and not simply a time of change.
The cultural features of postmodernity that began to take shape in the mid-twentieth century have seen technology -especially those related to communication and information- as an accelerating agent. It is not difficult to think that future generations will look at the twenty years we have been going through as a historical process of profound cultural transformations, mainly leveraged by technology and its possibilities.
Recently, due to the distancing measures related to the Covid-19 pandemic, we have witnessed the largest technology adoption process in history, where a huge portion of the global population were forced to use new technologies to continue with their economic, educational or personal activities.
Certainly the digital - that is, communications related to the Internet and its correlative programming and design processes - are transversal to all human activities. The benefits it incorporates to productivity are becoming more and more noticeable. Today there is no industry that is not called to assume technological change to survive in the medium term and eventually grow. This transversality implies rethinking processes, whether tangible or intangible. Robotization and artificial intelligence are a reality that is covering more and more aspects.
The speed in which these transformations take place require profound changes in education. And not only in terms of content, since the technological revolution itself has generated new possibilities and at the same time has profoundly transformed the intellectual habits of people in general and the youngest in particular.
Meanwhile, Latin America faces various problems related to this situation. First, to get their industries to adopt the technologies that allow them to be competitive against their first world competitors.
Second, to resolve the great inequalities in access to technology that exist in its population. Social and geographical gaps exclude many people from the possibility of training in new technologies.
Third, achieve State policies that favor digital education, removing the ideological and political bias that prevents the regularity and continuity of training programs in the region. Then, adapt its legal aspects to favor adaptation to this series of inexorable changes. Finally, ensure that the market and finance cover the expansion of innovation agents through credit.
In the latest edition of the Global Innovation Index 2020 prepared by the World Intellectual Property Organization, we must wait until position 54 to find Chile, the first Latin American country.
There is a disproportion between the positions of the countries of our region in terms of GDP compared to the innovation indices mentioned.
Our communities always rank lower on the innovation index relative to their position on the GDP index. For example, Argentina has the 27th GDP in the world, but is 80 in innovation. Brazil, which is the ninth largest economy in the world, is 62nd in the other order. Peru with GDP number 48, is 76 in innovation.
This correlation has to do directly with investments in R&D, entrepreneurial ecosystems and education. Of all the resources globally invested in research and development of new products, only 2.4% is invested in Latin America. While on the other hand 37.5% percent of world research is invested in the United States and Canada, 32.1% percent in the European Union and 25.4% percent in Asia.
Despite this situation, the digital revolution gives Latin American professionals the possibility of positioning themselves in the knowledge economy market, even though their countries have not been the most advanced in the industrialization processes typical of the 20th century (Oppenheimmer, Andres. [2014] Innovate or die!).
This, which occurs at a professional and personal level, should be developed at the level of companies, where the benefit for Latin American countries would be much greater.
Faced with the fourth industrial revolution, Latin American communities have the advantage of forming a huge idiomatic and cultural block that implies a priori a large market for their companies, given that today for the world of information geographic borders are less important than cultural ones.
At the same time -as a threat of not applying the necessary transformations- there is the possibility that the countries of the region will be definitively relegated to the extraction of raw materials and to being mere “markets” in the concert of the global knowledge economy.
It will then be necessary to complement State policies together with the private sphere, working on education, incentives for the knowledge economy and infrastructure on connectivity, and all this without neglecting the great economic and accessibility inequalities existing in the continent.
Faced with such a situation that combines opportunities and dangers, and recognizing the complexity and deadlines in which these changes can occur, but at the same time alerted to the need to be agile and diligent in making significant changes, Adveniat Foundation seeks to make its contribution from technological education, relating the public and private sectors for the benefit of society as a whole.