In Ethiopia, Transsion Holdings, a Chinese company, is manufacturing handsets costing as little as $10 in an industrial park outside Addis Ababa. Mobile phone models from Tecno, Infinix, and Itel brands, which all belong to Transsion, to be Made in Africa.

Almost 13 years ago, in December of 2005, I wrote my first column for BusinessWeek which began with the sentence “Designed in California, Built in China.” That referred to Apple’s iconic iPod, the MP3 player that industrial design made into a household name, one that led to a whole new medium: podcasting.

Imagine the scale, depth, and level of change that must take place in production planning and control, not to mention supply chains and global value chains, for this continental shift in design and manufacturing to have taken place in less than half a generation.