The Future is Shared leverages the concept of ‘shared economy’ for sustainable value re-creation/value extension, accountable personal carbon footprint-tracking, poverty reduction, enhanced living and environmental protection in an emerging market context with a focus on Nigeria. According to the author, “The Future is Shared is the African-centric answer to the big question of how AirBnB, Uber, LiftShare and others will shape the practice of future marketing, management”.
According to Adekanmbi, the shared economy philosophy extends to crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, disintermediation, on-demand services and recycling, with social, economic and more importantly, environmental sustainability advantages. This infers that “businesses that will win tomorrow must understand how to become shareable experiences that enrich sociality and sustainability”, said Adekanmbi.
An excerpt from the book reads, ”tomorrow’s ownership model is obviously a combination of ‘own to share’ and ‘share to own’. I have chosen to call this “per second ownership. It is a successful business term in the telecommunications industry, where customers can have real-time access to what they need, when they need it and how they need it, without having any post-usage carryover effects… This is a collective ecosystem that matches the ‘needs’ with the ‘haves’. As Jeremy Rifkin, Author and Economist, once said, “25 years from now, car sharing will be the norm and car ownership an anomaly”
The Author who spent enormous time traveling across countries to spend time with leading academia and research/development teams of various world-class organizations during his recently concluded one-year sabbatical across three countries said, “I had the huge privilege of sharing my work around the world and receiving challenging feedback and perspectives. I had to go back to raw coding, build my mathematical model from scratch and spend a lot of time engaging with the established body of work”.
For him, it was an exciting experience, because it provided him the rare opportunity to see how every piece of academic research could have instant boardroom relevance.
“I saw instances where superstar ideas for commercialization were not the exciting points for my professors. My executive experience really helped me to comb the world of doctoral-level learning with a high sense of expectation and curiosity”, he added.
His sabbatical was a time well spent working on bandwagon consumption behavior – the logic of how people influence others in social consumption. “I believe understanding this can be used to build predictable models to effectively monetize any industry. I also believe the same passion that drives our annual and quarterly targets must be applied to shift the frontier of executive education and application, because it takes much more to dig deeper into the transformational themes that have huge consequences on our future”.
Data, which forms a major bedrock of books, “is the currency of the future” but remains largely untapped today. Adekanmbi pointed out that in the 21st century, data can be equated to what Oil was in the 18th century. “It is the most valuable asset that will determine the future competitive advantage and operational survival of any business in the near future”.
Although, the concept of Future is Shared may appear distant, the author confirmed, “Nigerians are already living the essence of the sharing economy. They know how to rely on the crowd to pull resources for the collective benefit”. He cited example of traditional Esusu which banks like Diamond, Access and others are digitalizing. Ride-sharing business models like Jekalo, GoMyWay and RideBliss are other examples, just as Max Logistics, which works on a crowdsourced delivery model, among so many others. These businesses will be celebrated and showcased to the world during the launch of the book, at the Oriental Hotel in Lagos.
Activities for this book launch will include the unveiling of Data Science Nigeria, a Corporate Social Responsibility project by Adekanmbi, aimed at giving back to the society. The initiative seeks to train and mentor young Nigerians through face-to-face and virtual online classes, project-based support and holiday bootcamps, with the objective of “raising a generation of datapreneurs who can run data science businesses and bring good FOREX to Nigeria”.
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