Got fantastic news that my ‘Next Billion Users‘ book by Harvard Press has won the PROSE Award under the Business, Management, Finance category. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) unveiled their Subject Category Winners for the 2020 PROSE Awards honoring the best scholarly works published in 2019. These winners were selected by a panel of 19 judges from the 157 finalists previously identified from the more than 630 entries in this year’s PROSE Awards competition.
What is particularly exciting is to see how digital anthropology on a population that has long been ignored by the market and the state is finally of interest to a broader audience and more importantly, the business and tech sector who is now taking notice of this next billion demographic as legitimate consumers.
While there is concern of hyper commodification of the next billion market, my book actually challenges that blanket and passive approach. Instead, it reframes this engagement and builds nuance and incentive for tech and businesses at large to broaden their ways of understanding and meaningfully catering to the next billion user market which will expand their choices, keep them safe and optimize for civility, trust and pleasure instead of just profit and efficiency.
Payal Arora 