A country can become increasingly connected without becoming technologically advanced. It can expand internet access, digitize public services, produce thousands of computer science graduates, and encourage young people to pursue freelancing, yet remain a marginal player in the global technology economy.
Bangladesh risks becoming such a country. While the world is reorganizing its economic architecture around artificial intelligence, semiconductors, robotics, and advanced manufacturing, Bangladesh is still struggling to move beyond the consumption and adaptation of technologies developed elsewhere.
The uncomfortable question is whether the country is preparing to participate in the next industrial transformation or merely positioning itself as a market for its products. The distinction matters because the nature of economic competition is changing.
For decades, Bangladesh's comparative advantages have rested largely on inexpensive labour, export-oriented manufacturing, and a large domestic market. These advantages helped sustain growth, particularly through the ready-made garment industry.
But the emerging global economy increasingly rewards something different: The capacity to generate knowledge, develop intellectual property, design sophisticated products, and commercialize scientific discoveries. The countries that control these capabilities will exercise disproportionate influence over trade, investment, and the distribution of economic power.
The transformation is already visible in the corporate landscape. Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and TSMC represent more than successful businesses. They illustrate how technological capabilities can become strategic national assets.
South Korea's Samsung has been central to its industrial development, while Taiwan's semiconductor industry has established the country as an indispensable part of the global technology supply chain. These achievements were built through sustained investments in research, industrial expertise, and institutional capacity. Technology did not simply follow their economic progress; it helped create it.
The scale of the emerging opportunity is extraordinary. UNCTAD estimates that the global market for 17 frontier technologies, including artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and advanced robotics, could expand to $16.4 trillion by 2033. The AI market alone could approach $4.8 trillion.
Meanwhile, digitally delivered services have already become a multitrillion-dollar segment of international trade. This is not a distant technological possibility. It is an economic transformation unfolding in real time, attracting investment and reshaping the competitive relationship between nations.
Yet Bangladesh's participation remains remarkably modest. The country had set an ambitious target of earning $5bn from ICT exports by 2025. Actual ICT service exports amounted to approximately $724.6m in the 2024-25 fiscal year.
The shortfall is revealing. India has developed an enormous international technology services industry, while Pakistan's reported technology services exports have also exceeded Bangladesh's. The issue is not simply the difference in export earnings. It is the difference in the industrial ecosystems, research capabilities, and international market presence that make such earnings possible.
Bangladesh's predicament is perhaps best understood as an innovation trap - it has made progress in adopting digital technologies but has not developed a corresponding capacity to produce them. It has expanded the number of technology users without building enough technology creators.
Providing services through existing platforms is economically useful; designing the platforms, developing the underlying technologies, and owning the intellectual property can generate substantially greater strategic value.
The roots of this problem extend deep into the education system. Bangladesh continues to measure educational achievement primarily through examinations, grades, and certificates. Students are trained to reproduce information more efficiently than to challenge it, experiment with it, or transform it into new knowledge.
This approach may produce academic credentials, but technological innovation demands a different intellectual culture. It requires curiosity, independent reasoning, tolerance for failure, and the ability to connect knowledge across disciplines. These qualities cannot flourish in an environment where completing the syllabus often takes precedence over developing the capacity to think.
The answer, however, is not to dismiss humanities and social sciences in favour of engineering and computer science. Technological development is not exclusively a scientific enterprise.
Artificial intelligence raises questions of ethics, language, law, culture, and social responsibility. Advanced manufacturing requires management, communication, and institutional expertise.
What Bangladesh needs is an education system capable of connecting scientific knowledge with social understanding and practical application. The problem is not the presence of particular academic disciplines but the absence of meaningful intellectual and professional integration among them.
The weakness of the research environment makes this educational limitation even more serious. According to the University Grants Commission, public universities allocated only Tk190.65 crore for research out of a total approved budget of approximately Tk13,222 crore in the 2025-26 fiscal year. That amounts to around 1.44%.
Even this modest allocation is not always fully utilized. How can universities become centres of innovation when research remains a marginal component of their institutional priorities?
A university should be more than an institution that supplies graduates to the employment market. It should be a place where existing knowledge is questioned, new ideas are developed, and practical solutions emerge.
In Bangladesh, however, the connection between academic research and economic production remains weak. Researchers frequently lack adequate laboratories, funding, technological equipment, and opportunities to work with industries. Businesses, meanwhile, often prefer imported solutions because domestic research institutions cannot consistently provide commercially viable alternatives.
This disconnect creates a peculiar economic contradiction. Universities produce graduates, industries complain about the shortage of appropriately skilled workers, and the government invests in technology-related infrastructure, yet these three components rarely operate as parts of a coherent system. The result is an economy in which academic knowledge struggles to become industrial capability.
Memoranda of understanding and occasional research collaborations cannot resolve this structural problem. What is required is a permanent framework for industry-funded research, university-based innovation centres, technology incubation, and the commercialization of locally developed intellectual property.
The semiconductor sector offers a glimpse of what Bangladesh might achieve, provided its ambitions are matched by institutional preparation. According to BIDA, the country has more than 700 chip designers and recorded semiconductor-related exports exceeding $8m in 2024.
The ambition to increase exports to $1bn by 2030 is significant. But semiconductor development is not simply a matter of producing more designers. It involves specialized infrastructure, advanced research, substantial investment, intellectual property protection, and integration into complex international supply chains.
Bangladesh must recognize the distance between having a small presence in chip design and becoming a meaningful participant in the global semiconductor industry.
Artificial intelligence presents a similar challenge. Developing a Bengali-language large language model may be strategically important, particularly for a country with a large linguistic community. But a national AI ambition cannot be reduced to developing a model or announcing a policy.
It requires reliable datasets, computing capacity, skilled researchers, cybersecurity safeguards and an ecosystem capable of translating applications into productive services. Without these foundations, technological ambitions risk becoming another collection of policy documents with limited practical consequences.
There is also a governance dimension that deserves greater attention. Technological investment depends on confidence in institutions. Investors need predictable regulations, transparent decision-making, effective protection of intellectual property, and a stable policy environment.
Bureaucratic complications and frequent policy changes can undermine long-term investment, particularly in industries where research and product development require years before generating returns.
Public expenditure must also be judged by what it produces. Spending on buildings, equipment, and digital infrastructure is not synonymous with technological progress if these investments do not strengthen research, productivity, and innovation.
The objective should not be to accumulate technology projects, distribute devices, or increase the number of digital services. It should be to develop an economy capable of creating technological solutions to its own problems and competing in international markets.
HM Nazmul Alam is an academic, journalist, and political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently he teaches at IUBAT.