Presented at the GLOBELICS 6th International Conference 2008 22-24 September, Mexico City, Mexico.This paper intends to contribute to the current debate about the need of social and
productive technological change in LDCs. In particular, we analyse micro-enterprises and
SMEs' role in the tecno-economic paradigm change. Although commonly associated to
either traditional and retardant forces, the point we wish to make is that the vast majority
of the latent and emergent entrepreneurial force (i.e. micro-enterprises and SMEs) in
LDCs, at present largely disconnected from the national and transnational economic
circuit, represent a huge potential for the techno-economic paradigm change. By analogy,
these latent forces represent what Albert Einstein taught us about whereby a single brick
can be made to release a huge amount of energy in the form of an atomic explosion (De
Soto 2000). Latent entrepreneurship is comparable to the potential nuclear energy in
Einstein's brick, however, as should be clear by the end of the paper, our examination
departs from that of the De Soto´s in some important aspects
