Tech Leaders of Tomorrow

Some former winners such as Google helped give a leg up to the crop of 2009 Technology Pioneers chosen by the World Economic Forum

By Jennifer L. Schenker

The group of 20 young, fresh-faced computer programmers in jeans and polo shirts embossed with the company logo could have been with any Silicon Valley startup. But the team, lined up in New Delhi in July 2007 for a portrait taken by a news photographer, work for a Swiss company called Nivio, which employs more than 85% of its engineers and designers in India. The headline over the photo crows: "Indians invented world's first Windows-based online desktop."

Nivio is one of 34 companies chosen this year by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum to be among its 2009 Technology Pioneers—companies offering new technologies or business models that could advance the global economy and positively affect peoples' lives. It's a perfect example of how the technology business is evolving.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the forum's Tech Pioneers program. All the winners to date have made their mark in areas such as information technology, biotech, and energy. Some of them even had a hand in the success of this year's crop.

A Geographically Diverse Class

Max Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal (EBAY), a Tech Pioneer in 2001, is the founder of one of this year's winners, Slide, the inventor of a number of popular social networking applications, including "sheep throwing," a way that Facebook users get attention from one another. And search engine giant Google (GOOG), a winner in 2001, is an investor in three of the 2009 Tech Pioneers: a solar thermal energy company called BrightSource Energy, a wireless technology company called Ubiquisys, and CURRENT Group, which makes software that lets utilities manage their grids in real time.

But what really distinguishes this year's class is the number of companies based in new and different places. "We have never had such a geographically diverse class as this year, with more than 10% of our companies coming from emerging markets," says Rodolfo Lara, head of the forum's Tech Pioneers program. "We believe in five years' time we will probably have as many Tech Pioneers from emerging markets as we will have from Europe."

Indeed, innovative approaches to some of the world's thorniest problems are expected increasingly to come from emerging economies. These will be the biggest markets going forward, and with some of the biggest challenges. The argument goes, those who live there are the best placed to design the products and services this part of the world needs. Industry observers believe that many of those innovations also will end up being embraced by the developed world, so the next Google—or the next PayPal—could come from India or China.

Cross-Fertilization

This year, two of the Tech Pioneers hailed from Africa, one from China, one from India, and one from Latin America. But those figures are somewhat deceiving. Other companies in this year's class have their roots in the developing world. BioMedica Diagnostics, for example, a biotech based in Nova Scotia, Canada, was founded by Abdullah Kirumira, a Uganda native and trained chemist. He is using the proceeds from a lab test he developed for affluent countries, called QuikCoag, to help fund development of desperately needed lab tests to help save the lives of some of the world's poorest people—what he calls "cross-fertilization."