My career as a researcher gave me a front-row seat during the period when electronics quickly advanced from primitive prototype transistors and lasers to incredibly tiny devices, sophisticated software-driven systems, and vast computing and communication networks. It was an exciting time to be a scientist, and to make my own contributions to the progress of the field.

As a venture capital manager, I've had an equally fortunate vantage point. I saw digital technology become a global force, delivering new services and creating opportunities where none had existed before. I also had the opportunity to arrange funding for innovative companies that helped move the technology forward.

No one in the 1950s and 1960s, when the fundamental discoveries were rolling out of US corporate laboratories, could have imagined that digital electronic technology would help to lift whole countries from isolation and poverty into participation in the global economy. But I've seen first hand how these revolutionary innovations have improved the human condition and even realigned the economic order among nations.

Today we live in a global village sustained by digital computing and communication technologies. It is a much more complex world, technologically, socially, and politically. To conclude this study of the nature and influence of digital technology, we will look at what the globalization of technology means for developed and developing nations alike, and how innovation and manufacturing can build prosperity at both stages of economic progress.

We'll begin with an assessment of the current situation.