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Hong Kong people score right at the top of social media awareness. Photo: Bloomberg

Hot stuff, Johnny. Well, then again, maybe not so hot if you pre-order the coffee too early. It strikes me, however, that if this sort of hi-tech makes it to the budget speech as an example of the best that Hong Kong can do, then it's high time we dropped hi-tech from the budget.

The same goes for the trick of wireless chargers for electronic devices. It seems to me that I have heard of this one before. At this rate, we'll have Johnny reinventing the wheel if he stays financial secretary much longer.

First, however, he and his colleagues are intent on reviving the innovation and technology bureau after a legislative council filibuster killed it.

The reason for this sudden resumption of interest is apparently that an also-ran university in the United States has rated us No3 on its worldwide Digital Evolution Index.

Don't get me wrong here. I think the rating entirely deserved. It's only that when you look at it more closely you see that it is not at all what our bureaucrats think it is. This rating is not about inventing hi-tech, but about using it.

According to our report, the index analyses four drivers of the digital economy. They are:

 

  • We've come a long way since the early 1990s when Hong Kong Telephone held a government sanctioned monopoly on both local and overseas telecommunications.

     

    Many of our regional neighbours are still stuck there, but we have broken out and the change was complete when it came. Hong Kong now has one of the most competitive and efficient tech infrastructures in the world.

    This had nothing to do, however, with inventing new things. It came because of changes to law, administrative practice and humdrum ordinary jobs like digging in cable lines and installing Wi-fi points, all pretty lo-tech work.

     

  • Don't look to me for this. I don't have a Facebook account as I like my gossip face to face, and if I can't get on the web for some reason, well, that's that, I'm shut out and prayer is my only option.

     

    This makes 7.2 million people in Hong Kong who score right at the top of social media awareness and one who does not. I don't think I pull down the overall score by much. Note again, moreover, that Facebook was not invented here. We rate high on the index because we use it.

     

  • Yes, our government makes plenty of tech mistakes, Cyberport and Science Park for instance, but we don't waste even a small fraction of as much money on them as Singapore does. There is still plenty of common sense in this town.

     

    What our government policy has rather concentrated on in substance, if not in talk, is a framework of law that encourages people to make use in their everyday work of the best that the rest of the world offers. Greedy academics trying to make the public purse pay for repackaged ideas constitute only a sideshow.

     

  • That's us. Find any place that does it better. We can clog it up with regulatory obstacles and government paperwork, of course, and we are certainly heading that way, but this is still one area in which we shine.

     

    Take note once more, however, that it has nothing to do with hi-tech invention. Our strengths here are just our old ones of trading, finance and adaptability to whatever comes Hong Kong's way.

    In short, this Digital Evolution Index makes no argument at all for establishing an innovation and technology bureau. If anything, it suggests that we will just be led the wrong way with such a bureau.

    But Johnny is much taken with the idea of ordering a coffee by smartphone. There goes another big dollop of our money down the drain.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: No need for an innovation and technology bureau
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