[Guest blog post: Rob Salkowitz is author of Young World Rising: How Youth, Technology and Entrepreneurship are Changing the World from the Bottom Up (John Wiley & Sons, 2010). He lives and works in Seattle. Follow him on Twitter @robsalk]

With the increasing speed of IT innovation, it’s become commonplace to remark on the “leapfrog effect,” where lagging adopters of new technology end up gaining an advantage over the first movers because the technology is so much better by the time they finally invest. This is especially true in emerging economies throughout Africa, which lacked the resources to implement succeeding generations of landline communication systems, only to vault ahead in the age of wireless mobility.

This leapfrog effect is not limited to technology; it also applies to management thinking and organizational structure. Businesses that have been around for 50 or 100 years may have many advantages as a result of their experience, scale and culture, but they also have a much harder time adapting to change. Today, when change is the defining characteristic of the global economy, it is far more advantageous in certain respects to appear on the scene brand-new, with no legacy and no preconceptions, than to be burdened with having to constantly overhaul aging infrastructure and rethink aging ideas.

The implications of this managerial leapfrog-effect are evident in Africa’s burgeoning tech sector. Yes, many of these companies are benefiting from arriving on the scene after platforms and technologies have matured, so they do not face the same costs of adaptation as older competitors. But the real difference is in the mindset. Many of Africa’s most interesting new tech-driven ventures are among the world’s leaders in fully grasping the implications of the ICT revolution, and are creating organizations that are uniquely well-adapted to the new realities of the 21^st century.

Ushahidi, which needs no introduction to Afrinnovator readers, is of course notable for its application of mobile, geo-location and web-based technology to crisis response management. But it is even more innovative in its structure. The company was born online as an outgrowth of the collaboration of several African bloggers. It is a distributed organization with contributors across the continent and around the world participating through ICT networks. It leverages the skills and code base of the open source community to rapidly develop and optimize its product.

Ushahidi’s mission spans the social and commercial, the public and the private. It has found a way to bring the entrepreneurial innovation of the private sector to a core function of government and NGOs. It provides employment and recognition to its talented staff of African IT professionals, and serves as a model for aspiring entrepreneurs around the world because it has effectively used the global communication network to spread its story.

None of this would have been possible even 10 years ago – certainly not in Africa, but not anywhere else either. There were no blogs, not much of an open source community, no social media or awareness of how these could be used in a business context, and very limited opportunity for initiatives originating outside the developed core of North America, Europe and North Asia to go global. As things changed during the 00’s, they changed for everyone. And yet, it is consistently the new organizations and the young people – the ones who were born digital and born global – who are fully able to grasp the implications and act quickly to capitalize on the opportunity.

These people and organizations exist everywhere in the world, but the Young World countries of Africa, South Asia and Latin America enjoy a particular, and somewhat ironic, advantage. In North America, Europe and Japan, the “Millennial” generation that grew up marinated in digital culture has come of age in the shadow of an enormous “Baby Boom” cohort that controls the levers of power. Their emergence is a continual negotiation between old and new, between establishment and insurgent.

Those negotiations are never easy. Old institutions of business and government that were optimized for a centralized, linear, pre-digital world change slowly because the decision-makers have to translate every new technology innovation into their old managerial business model. Young people with a vastly different attitude on a range of issues from personal privacy to work-life balance to the relevance of social issues (energy conservation, environmentalism, social justice) in their personal lives coexist uneasily with a legacy mindset that is deeply invested in outdated thinking and still numerous and powerful enough to stand in the way of change.

In Africa and across the “Young World,” youth vastly outnumber their elders. They are also more likely to be literate and live in cities that are better-served with ICT infrastructure than rural areas. Many existing institutions are in disrepair or disrepute. Their advocates may remain powerful, but their days are numbered. The spread of new ICTs offers the potential to break old patterns and create new models that fit the realities of the 21^st century: lean and sustainable, networked and global, inclusive, and unconstrained by arbitrary boundaries. None of this guarantees success, but it holds promise, and that’s not a phrase you hear much in relation to the global economy these days.

As the African tech-entrepreneurial ecosystem matures, the effects of this organizational leapfrog effect have the potential to surmount not just technological legacies, but the more profound social, political, and economic legacies that have hampered African development until now.