In the last few years, the world has morphed into an electronically connected interdependent atomic economic unit where a disruption in one marketplace affects the others. Consequently, it has become naïve to appraise the competitive challenges and opportunities for nations or indeed a continent without looking at the big global picture. Recent financial crises have shown in no small measure that the world is interlinked and the global commerce and industry has been transformed by the extraordinary powers of information and communication technologies.

Indeed when America suffers mortgage loan crises, Nigerian citizens are affected through liquidity crises in their banking sector. And when euro-zone nations experience debt burdens, all the major global financial districts are reshaped.

Increasingly, individuals are having much power either in the capital markets, governments or entertainments and the era of centralized political power is progressively giving way to citizen’s power. Our world is being redesigned and new waves of innovation are evolving to disrupt our modern economic structures. And this trend is expected to continue as the powers of microprocessors continue to improve and information gets cheaper. New industries will emerge; some traditional ones will collapse.

While the redesigning process is global, the innovation race is not. Many developing nations are not adapting fast enough because of deficiency in knowledge and infrastructural capability. And the developed world will not wait for them because the competition is intense and the global economic health fragile. They need innovation to provide more jobs, support their welfare systems and advance the living standards of their citizens.

Technologies will continue to disrupt markets with the like of nanotechnology showing the capacity to demise commodity markets. This poses security threats if plans are not developed to retrain those that will be displaced from the industries. The debts and financial crises in the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) are showing that a single currency is not a panacea to all economic problems. As it offers a larger market, single currency also could damage a weak continental economic structure.

In the midst of the challenges above, there are also opportunities during this redesigning process. Consequently, the objective of this post is to establish a prestigious compilation of research advances, discussions and reviews on the challenges and opportunities as they affect the world, with minor focus on the developing nations.

We are looking for posts on the following areas: Technology, Business, Debt crises, Finance, Health, Government, Trade, Immigration, Environment & Sustainability, Education, Currency, Energy, Risk and Security, Welfare, Poverty, Employment,  Corruption, Terrorism, Law, Economic Growth, IPR etc.

We invite posts from the academic, non-governmental, professional and business communities to submit a maximum of 600-word post on what you think is the most important challenge facing the world and how that will affect the developing world. You can also look at it from the other way around; what is the most important challenge to the developing world and how will the world affect it.

Simply, we seek:

–          Describe one or two major challenges or opportunities in the world

–          Explain how that those challenges or opportunities will affect developing nations

–          Propose a solution on how developing nations can overcome the challenges or take advantage of the opportunities

Tekedia is an open innovation forum – we are looking for ideas and please send your posts. Some great contributions will make them to a new book we are working on. Remember that if you cannot write, it may be time to consider enrolling in any of the online business degrees and get the training you deserve.