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The following is an excerpt from Young World Rising: How Youth, Technology and Entrepreneurship are Changing the World from the Bottom Up, by Rob Salkowitz, published by John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Suhas Gopinath knew he was in trouble. He had failed an exam at his high school in Bangalore, and his mother would not be happy. Like middle-class mothers the world over, she believed strongly in education as the means to achieve a good life and a stable job, and leaned hard on her children to excel at school. Surely she would take his poor result on the exam as proof that something was amiss with the extracurricular activity that was taking up more and more of his waking hours.

“You are spending too much time at that Internet café,” she said to her 15-year-old son. “You must swear on my head that you won’t visit that shop and will focus on your studies!”

“But mother, what about Bill Gates?” replied Suhas.

“What about him?”

“He’s the richest man in the world, a great entrepreneur who built his company from scratch, and he never finished his studies, so why do you force me to?”

Bill Gates, who has spent a considerable portion of his fortune promoting education around the world, would probably not approve of young Suhas’s reasoning, but he might allow himself a certain pride in the achievements of the young man he inspired.

The reason Suhas was failing in his studies is that he was spending his nights building Web sites for businesses in the United States, a skill he taught himself at age 14 when he minded the local cyber café during the owner’s daily lunch break. Seeing the boy’s talent, the owner suggested he register as a freelance developer.

For the first year, it was tough going. Suhas did not have a PC at home and had to work at the Internet shop. A friend in the United States helped him generate sales leads, but companies were reluctant to do business with someone so young and lacking in formal academic credentials.

Suhas eventually hit on a strategy to reach his target market of small manufacturers.  He would identify prospects from the phone listings, seeking out companies that had e-mail addresses but no Web presence. He sent the companies e-mail inquiries suggesting that he represented a firm in India interested in placing a large order for import. The companies would respond to the opportunity, offering to mail out printed catalogs because they were not on the Web. Suhas then curtly informed them that he could not do business with them, because their lack of e-commerce capabilities did not meet his supply standards. Several weeks later, he followed up with a brochure from his real company, Globals Inc., offering to design and develop a site at an attractive price.

This scheme was such a success that it is now studied in marketing programs at Indian business schools. “I am sure that none of those companies regret their decisions,” says Suhas. “They are small businesses in a global economy and they need to be on the Web, for themselves and their customers. The next inquiry they receive might be real.”

Suhas spent the remainder of his teenage years building up his company. Over the next several years, Globals grew to employ 120 people in 12 locations worldwide, but the company culture is still rooted in that same ethic, where team members are given respect and room to express their talent. On Friday afternoons, visitors might find the Bangalore offices dark, and the team of hardened IT professionals—most in their mid-20s—blowing off steam playing hide and seek with their 21-year-old CEO.

Suhas tried to keep up with his studies, but his attendance problems at the local university were so severe that the school would not allow him to sit for his final exams. “I had joined the World Economic Forum and was traveling quite a bit,” Suhas explained. Indeed, the international organization, whose annual meetings in Davos, Switzerland feature a who’s-who of the global elite from Bill Clinton to NandanNilekani, honored Suhas Gopinath, its youngest member, as Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2008. Not a bad excuse for missing classes!

Today, Suhas presides over an expanding IT services business. He is a passionate advocate for entrepreneurism, meeting with everyone from students to government leaders.

Despite the influence of his example and his energy, there are still people who remain to be convinced. His mother, who once scolded him for failing a high school exam, still frets that his unsettled lifestyle will make it hard for him to find a bride, and sometimes asks if it would be possible for him to put one of his friends in charge of Globals so he could go and get a steady job working for Infosys.

*       *       *

Suhas Gopinath has received a lot of attention in the global media. Who can resist the story of the teenaged CEO sipping champagne with the grandees of Davos when he’s barely of legal age to buy a beer at the corner shop? Some might say his case is exceptional: In a country of more than a billion people, it is possible to stumble upon a one-in-a-billion individual.

The sheer novelty of Suhas’s personal story should not obscure the larger point. This ambitious young man found success because of his talent, to be sure. But he also benefited from a unique confluence of powerful forces that is extending the opportunity to express talent more broadly across the globe and more deeply into the socioeconomic scale with each passing day.

The spread of information networks and the development of information and communication technology (ICT) skills across a broader swath of the workforce open new avenues to prosperity that did not exist even a decade ago in many parts of the world. It also creates a whole new set of opportunities and uncertainties for global businesses. The old problems of the Young World may still remain, but the introduction of this new dynamic can begin to bend the curve upward.

Young World Rising traces the shape of that bending curve.

Rob Salkowitz is an author, consultant, speaker and entrepreneur, and a principal in the Seattle-based digital communications firm MediaPlant, LLC. Follow him on Twitter @robsalk.