Some technologies announce their arrival with pomp and circumstance.
Artificial intelligence. Autonomous vehicles. Spatial computing. Cue the launch events, keynote demos, and confident predictions about where the world is going next.
Others arrive quietly, like they’re going through the back door.
USSD. Pay-as-you-go solar. Offline-first systems. Voice notes as commercial infrastructure.
These rarely get described as frontier innovation. Never by the innovation influencers anyway. Perhaps they look temporary. Improvised. Waiting to be replaced by something more sophisticated. They feel politely tolerated, not celebrated.
And yet many of them produced something the first list, for all its visibility, often struggles with: rapid, voluntary adoption at scale, in conditions where adoption is genuinely hard to earn.
A bank CEO describe USSD as innovation and I instinctively judged him for choosing the wrong word. USSD is a string of numbers and asterisks that returns a text menu. No interface. No design. It predates the smartphone by decades. From a Silicon Valley lens: primitive. From a friction lens: it works on any phone, on any network, with almost no data, even when the connection is weak. It reaches people that apps cannot reach. Calling it innovation seemed like calling a dirt road infrastructure.
He was right.
I know this because I built on it. At Migo, we deployed machine learning — instant lending decisions, real-time risk assessment — behind a USSD interface. The algorithm is still one of the most sophisticated I’ve seen. But the delivery mechanism looked, to anyone trained in innovation culture, like a step backward. What it actually was: a forcing function. Building for USSD first meant building for constraint. And building for constraint produced an architecture flexible enough to deploy across web, messaging, ATM, any interface that any market demanded. The interface that looked primitive shaped a product that was more durable than anything built from the other direction.
Nigerian operators understand this instinctively, even when it goes unexpressed. Nigeria has enjoyed instant payments since 2011. The United States didn’t launch its equivalent until 2023. Twelve years later.
Innovation culture has a test for what counts: does it introduce something new? It’s a supply-side test — it measures novelty, visible sophistication, the thing that didn’t exist before. When that test dominates, something else fills the gap where adoption should be. In startup culture it’s called vision. In certain pitch rooms it arrives as vibes. The hope that what was built will find its people. None of these are dishonest. But none of them are adoption.
The more honest test is behavioral: did people reorganise around this — voluntarily, at scale, before anyone wrote the think-piece? USSD passed that test. M-Pesa passed it. Instant payments in Nigeria passed it. Quietly. Without a launch event. Without a keynote.
Innovation born from constraint doesn’t announce itself.
It just gets adopted.
What in your market is already passing the behavioral test — that you haven’t called innovation yet?
These reflections are part of a longer work in progress — The Emergent Economy — which explores how markets form before institutions notice them.
Absolutely spot on!
I like the food for thoughts you always add at the end.
Thank you Adia.
I have a question though - Does innovation always have to be tied to tech?