CONCEPT
Absorptive Capacity
Juma's term for the institutional ecosystem that determines whether a society can translate an innovation into broadly shared benefit — educational systems, economic institutions, regulatory frameworks, and cultural narratives operating together.
Absorptive capacity is more than technical skill or infrastructure. It is the entire institutional ecosystem that conditions how an innovation lands in a society: educational systems that prepare people to use new technologies, economic institutions that translate capability into livelihood, regulatory frameworks that govern deployment, and cultural narratives that provide sense-making resources for navigating change. Societies with high absorptive capacity experience innovation transitions as expansions of possibility. Societies with low absorptive capacity experience the same transitions as disruptions that benefit the already-advantaged while further marginalizing the already-disadvantaged. The investment in absorptive capacity is not a response to any particular technology. It is preparation for the condition of perpetual technological transition that characterizes modern economies.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Juma developed the concept through decades of work on technology transfer to African economies. The pattern he observed repeatedly was that the same technologies produced dramatically different outcomes in different institutional environments. Green Revolution crop varieties transformed Asian agriculture but struggled in