Category Archives: Emerging Futures

Design Thinking for the post pandemic era

By Niti Bhan | Published: November 16, 2020

Design must change if we’re to meet the targets for the climate change goals. And, not only must design transform itself to be utilitarian for the needs of the novel ways of making, doing, being, that are emerging as an outcome of the global pandemic shock, but at the same time these new systems must […]

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The Global System’s Fulcrum has Changed in Location and Trajectory

By Niti Bhan | Published: November 15, 2020

Where, the innovation flowed outwards from age old centers of world system changing such as the Bay Area of the US Pacific Coastline or more recently, in the first visible shift this century, from the Pearl River Delta region of mainland China, now has shifted its locus of pivoting the levers of the system into […]

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Coronavirus side-effect: Transformation of China’s business models, logistics, and service delivery

By Niti Bhan | Published: February 29, 2020

Just the way the SARs epidemic kicked off China’s e-commerce revolution back in 2003, the ongoing COVID-19 containment strategies maybe triggering an even larger transformation of the Chinese economic ecosystem. I went looking today for the earliest signals of what might be underway. Rural China is facing the biggest challenge right now as the spring […]

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Transition to Student Life

By Niti Bhan | Published: August 19, 2019

I’ve been too busy to blog since August began, transitioning into the spaces where I will be a fulltime student once more, after 30 years. Now that the rush of registration and photography and getting all the keycards sorted is over, my time is my own again and I can write. You can see my […]

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The Perfect Storm: A Continent, A Phone, A Business Model

By Niti Bhan | Published: July 20, 2019

In the mid 1990s, in a small city in northern Finland, engineers and designers began work on the product development of a mobile phone that would eventually become one of the best selling Nokia models ever – the 3310, released in Europe and the Far East in the year 2000. The continent of Africa was […]

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The African Continental Free Trade Agreement and the Age of Interoperability

By Niti Bhan | Published: July 15, 2019

I have been writing on cross border mobile financial flows across the African continent since early 2015, when the partnerships and agreements made between African telcos to provide interoperability between their mobile money services first began to hit the headlines. In my last post back in August 2016, I asked if Cross Border Mobile Money […]

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Book Review: Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel

By Niti Bhan | Published: July 5, 2019

Although the book I’ll be reviewing today was first published in the year 2007, I only came upon it this year in a used bookstore. Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved lays bare the innards of the world’s food distribution systems and the market dominance of the megacorps in the business. The Guardian’s original review captures […]

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Kenya’s informal economy clambering on to the information highway through their smartphones

By Niti Bhan | Published: March 9, 2019

Sometimes cliches are the only way to communicate the sheer breadth and depth of the transformation now undergoing in the informal sectors, such as trade and light manufacturing, thanks to affordable smartphones and data bundles. I began calling it digital and not online yesterday when we discovered many people didn’t recognize the word “online” in […]

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Emergence of a decentralized digital economy? Snippets from Nigeria and Kenya

By Niti Bhan | Published: December 22, 2018

Continuing the conversation from the recent posts on app enabled demand redistribution as well as digital platforms being used by informal sector economic actors to boost their own productivity and efficiency, I thought to share snippets from these two recent articles I just came across, as cases in point. From Nigeria, West Africa: How WhatsApp […]

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