Innovation shock in the world order
Innovation has become a key word of the 21st century. We hear more and more about innovation, innovation centres, innovation parks, and all countries are investing more and more capital in this area. Innovation competition has become the main theme of the 21st century, of the Industrial Revolution 4.0.
Innovation shock in the world order
Geurasia

Innovation shock in the world order

Photo: iStock
02/05/2024 09:00

Levente Horváth, Ph.D.,
Director of the Eurasia Center,
Editor-in-Chief of Eurasia

Innovation has become a key word of the 21st century. We hear more and more about innovation, innovation centres, innovation parks, and all countries are investing more and more capital in this area. Innovation competition has become the main theme of the 21st century, of the Industrial Revolution 4.0.

But innovation is not new in the history of mankind, it has determined the prosperity and power of mankind. Even in prehistoric times, many innovations changed the quality of life - just think of the Stone Age, the Iron Age and the Bronze Age. At that time, it was not yet possible to speak of a world order, but even then it was clear that the community or people with the best means of defending or occupying a territory ruled it. The importance of innovation runs throughout history and was later, with a great leap from prehistory to modernity, closely linked to world order. Countries that were innovative dominated the world and were thus economically and/or militarily stronger than other countries.
Levente Horváth
The First Industrial Revolution began between 1769 and 1850 in Great Britain and then took place in some regions of Europe and North America. Great Britain was at the forefront of modernisation, making the British the world's leading trading state, controlling world trade through colonisation and becoming the world's hegemonic ruler. The Second Industrial Revolution, also known as the Technological Revolution, took place between 1870 and the First World War. Here, too, Great Britain was at the forefront, but the United States of America also played an important role. Great Britain was the dominant power and the USA was the emerging power. The Third Industrial Revolution, the Digital Revolution, took place from the Second World War to the end of the 20th century, when the USA and the Soviet Union faced each other in the Cold War. The Americans emerged victorious and made the USA the hegemonic ruler of the world order.

Today, we are witnessing Industrial Revolution 4.0, in which the USA is now competing with China for supremacy. And as we can see from history, the stakes are high, not only in terms of who is the more innovative country, but also in terms of whether the US can maintain its hegemonic dominance in the unipolar world order it controls, or whether a new multipolar world order will emerge as envisioned by China.
China has become an innovation superpower, but other Asian countries are also rising in the innovation rankings. Thank you to China's leadership, Asian countries account for 68 per cent of patent applications, but Japan, South Korea and India are also among the world leaders, and Asian universities now make up a quarter of the world's top 100 universities. And there are many more examples, which you can read about in detail in this issue.

But apart from the "dry" figures, my personal experience from travelling in Asia is that Europeans in Asia are no longer confronted with culture shock, but with innovation shock. You get the feeling that you have travelled into the future - Asia is already in the 21st century, while Europe is still living in the 20th.
#innovation
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