Just back from the Balkans - a few signals that our innovation map is upside down:
🇦🇱 Tirana, Albania: A communist pyramid turned AI training centre. Once the most isolated, now among the most agile. 🇽🇰 Pristina, Kosovo: Starlink dishes on crumbling concrete. The diaspora sends contracts home. People stay and log in. 🇲🇰 Skopje, North Macedonia: Code ships to Berlin in seconds. Capital still needs the handshake. 🇧🇬 Sofia, Bulgaria: Building a national-language AI model and a €90m supercomputer. Digital sovereignty emerging from Soviet-era stairwells.
This is Azeem Azhar’s ‘exponential gap’ made visible: a growing chasm between accelerating technology and slower-moving institutions and imaginations. What I saw suggests the gap runs both ways.
Yes, technology races ahead of infrastructure. Yes, human institutions lag.
But there is also an imagination gap in reverse. How many imagine Sofia as an AI hub, Kosovo as a remote-work powerhouse or Albania as a tech training ground. Our mental maps have not caught up.
The exponential age shows the world is spiky, not flat. It is unexpected and often invisible from the traditional centres of power. The future is being built in places we are not looking, by people we are not tracking, in ways that do not fit our narratives.
The question might not be whether these places will catch up to us. It might be whether we notice them passing us by.
#Future #ExponentialAge #Technology #Innovation #DigitalTransformation #AI #Blockchain #Startups #Tirana #Albania #Pristina #Kosovo #Skopje #NorthMacedonia #Sofia #Bulgaria with thanks to British Embassy Tirana Municipality of Tirana Innovation Centre Kosovo INSAIT - Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology Sofia Tech Park
