A Phone Is a Cow: How Pioneers of the Mobile Revolution Helped Millions Lift Themselves Out of Poverty

Description

The untold stories of a generation of pioneers who brought the mobile revolution to global majorities worldwide

Far more than a phone, today’s mobile is a powerful handheld computer embedded within a global communications network–and accessible to nearly everyone, everywhere. Achieving technological inclusion at this scale required both science-based inventions and opportunity-seeking innovations; the structure of standards and the adaptability of startups; the resources of the world’s greatest corporate research lab and the persistence of a generation of entrepreneurs.

Philip Auerswald relates the epic tale of the mobile phone’s transformation from an inaccessible urban luxury to an indispensable global necessity. The book conveys the untold stories of determined innovators who brought the mobile revolution worldwide. Collectively, their work has had a decisively greater impact on the lives of most people on the planet than the activities of Silicon Valley titans usually featured in the books that line airport bookshelves. In the stories of these market pioneers, we see replicable processes for bringing frontier technologies to excluded populations by combining tenacity with empathy and creative foresight.

A Phone Is a Cow will draw readers in with the patterns that connect history, economics, technology, sociology, ethics, and daily lived experience–and provide a richer understanding of the long-term trends that matter most.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Contributors: Philip E. Auerswald,Bengt Holmström (Foreword by)
Published: 06/02/2026
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
ISBN: 9781647127107
Pages: 290
Weight: 1.22lbs
Size: 1.04″ H x 9.28″ L x 6.27″ W

About the Author

Philip E. Auerswald is a professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government; cofounder and coeditor of the journal Innovations; and the founding board chair and president of the National Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He has written numerous books, including The Coming Prosperity: How Entrepreneurs Are Transforming the Global Economy (2012).

Bengt Holmström, a Finnish economist and Nobel Laureate, is the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.