Immersed in technology and studying in an intellectual environment, it is too easy for many of us to feel that knowledge and technology are the panacea for the human race to lead healthier lives and to protect the ecosystems that the life of our species so very much depends on. Professor Blalock’s discussion on “Barriers to Adoption” did a great job of educating me about issues as economic or social aspects that can stand in the way of progress, and helped me clearly understand that the desired outcome will likely be out of reach unless those issues are also intentionally dealt with.

Even though Professor Blalock’s discussion was on “why technology isn’t helping the poor”, he astutely started the conversation with something closer to home that affects our own lives. He asked us about environmental issues, and specifically whether we believe global warming will be impacting us in the next few generations. And we had clear agreement in the audience that global warming will impact us. He then pointed out that more eco-friendly vehicles like the Prius can help reduce global warming, and asked why we aren’t all driving eco-friendly vehicles. In fact, as he expected, very few in the audience drove electric or hybrid cars. And the reasons from the audience ranged from cost to style to pragmatic issues such as size or safety of the vehicles. This simple poll of the audience made it abundantly clear that better technology and understanding its benefits are far from sufficient in making a real and significant change.

Professor Blalock proceeded to discuss his own research on clean cooking stoves in East Africa. In Uganda, villagers commonly use a three-stone wood-burning stove that is both harmful to their health (smoke) and to the environment (inefficient burning of the wood leads to more deforestation). There is no shortage of relatively cheap technology that is much healthier and more efficient than these stoves. Nevertheless, many issues stand in the way of adoption. For example, a stove that costs $15 is not affordable. Cheaper but slightly less efficient stove are also available but are not adopted widely. As part of the research, villagers were allowed to try the stoves for free for a month and either return it or pay for it across several months. This approach led to a much higher adoption rate of about 50%. So it is clearly possible to get higher adoption if people become more familiar and comfortable with a new technology and it is made more affordable through financing. But the real shocker is that after a few years, many of the purchased stoves were no longer being used and people were back to the three-stone alternative! So clearly not all barriers to long-term adoption were dealt with.
As someone pursuing a career in high-tech, it was enlightening for me to understand that significant adoption of new technologies has many potential barriers and that those barriers need to be explicitly dealt to achieve wide-spread adoption and a real shift in behavior.