Experiencing the magic of Kalevala
Last Saturday, the 13th of March – a dark night of the new moon – I received a copy of Kalevala from a friend of mine who can best be described as an Icelandic poet. This was not a gift; only a loan. A tattered copy published in the 80s – purchased secondhand – this […]
Looking back at 2020 from Mama Mboga’s eyes: The Pandemic as Natural Disaster
I am moved today by my work to look back at this agonizingly long year of separations and losses and delays for peoples around the world. Uncertainty and complexity have both increased, and economic volatility has become the order of the day, regardless of the development status of the region or location. More people in […]
Closing the Circle: Can integration of the flows in the post consumption ecosystem of Global North & South aid resilient recovery for all?
It was in July 2009 that I first attempted to visualize the significantly large subsector of informal recycling that fed the informal industrial ecosystem with re-processed ‘raw’ materials for their manufacturing output. The first draft was based on what I’d seen and documented in The Philippines, and in India, during the fieldwork for the ‘prepaid […]
Response to “How to Think about Consumer Innovation in Africa”
Encouragement from my Nigerian tweeps to go ahead and write a rebuttal to a recent article in TechCabal shared on Twitter yesterday has led to this post. Given that my doctoral dissertation is based on my past decade of work in innovation & design planning for the vast majority of the population that comprises the […]
Design Thinking for the post pandemic era
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 […]
The Global System’s Fulcrum has Changed in Location and Trajectory
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 […]
Half a year, 2020 : The Remote Resilience and Recovery Project
I have umpteen drafts saved, of posts I began writing since the last published one on 29th February this year, and never finished. 2020 has outdone itself in its impact on all of human society, across our entire planet. I have been active on Twitter, where my literature reviews, in service of the pivot I […]
Coronavirus side-effect: Transformation of China’s business models, logistics, and service delivery
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 […]
From Flat to Fragmented: Observing the Impact of Sudden Jump in Complexity on Startup’s Development Journey
With increasing diversity of factors that impact the product development journey comes increasing complexity in managing the product development process. For startups in particular, there is little difference between the startup’s development journey and the product development journey. Consider the phases of the startup development journey as illustrated by StartupCommons below: Validation and Growth phases […]
Value Webs: Structure and Characteristics of the African Market Economy
When these markets are analyzed, moreover, they turn out to have a structure very unlike those of the West. ~ The End of Corporate Imperialism by CK Prahalad and Kenneth Lieberthal, HBR “Best of 1998″ When Prahalad and Lieberthal wrote this sentence over twenty years ago, they were referring to the huge consumer markets of […]
