“How did Gatorade revitalize itself in the wake of Red Bull and Starbucks? How did OpenTable come to be? How did Four Seasons become the world’s leading luxury hotel brand? What makes one leader or company thrive while others languish in mediocrity?” asked Soren Kaplan in his book. Leapfrogging is the answer to the questions.

Leapfrogging is a really straightforward idea that has had a lot of impact in the real world. Essentially, a country or an organization uses technological advancements to bypass growth phases that smaller, more developed nations or corporations have had to go through. It happens when a corporation skips over conventional stages of growth in order to either leap right to the newest technology (stage-hopping) or follow a different direction of technical development involving emerging technologies that provide unexplored opportunities (path-carving). Fresh ways of thought quickly lead to new forms of doing and being – and new ways of winning – through leapfrogging.

Leapfrogging results in strategies that allow you to fully outperform your competitors, even though they are more developed, have a larger infrastructure, and more resources. Leapfrogging to business breakthrough is about changing the game – creating something new or doing something radically different that produces a significant leap forward.

However, in Africa, there is a saying that goes, “It is not the big who eat the small; it is the quick who eat the slow!” Should businesses build adversity in order to accelerate innovation? Should companies do this as a corporate tactic, i.e. challenge their employees in developed nations to identify disruptors?

Leapfrogging can be regarded as an enabler of sustainable growth rather than a panacea (cure) for all emerging-market development issues. Leapfrog growth can have disruptive consequences when sufficiently funded by a stable and diverse innovation environment and good governance. Leapfrogging, though, is just one piece of the puzzle. In that situation, policymakers must consider two questions: how can organisation allow leapfrogging growth, and how can they ensure that leapfrogging generates real value?

A strategy that has worked for some is to leapfrog into global leadership in targeted areas, as South Korea did with high-definition television (HDTV) and China is now endeavouring to do with electric vehicles. Rapid technological advances open windows of opportunity for trailing or nascent economies to quickly take leading positions in prosperity-sustaining value chains without having to replicate the paths taken by more established competitors.

Leapfrogging links the apparently “messy” phase of industry breakthroughs to new research, novel policies and realistic methods.