Want to innovate? Think in BoP projects

Base of the piramide, there's potential. I've search the posts but no one is giving any attention to the bottom of the pyramid market. It's all bout giving people that lives with less than 2.5 dlls the acces to the world of commodities. Maybe we can find an idea to help some of the problems that this people face, but how about if we just give them the tools like microcredit or peepoo, for them to find their own pats to a better life.

The phrase “bottom of the pyramid” was used by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt in his April 7, 1932 radio address, The Forgotten Man, in which he said “These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power...that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”

The BoP projects are business that focuses on the 2.5 billion people around the globe that survive with less than 2.5 dlls a day. BoP projects looks at poor people as partners and innovators, not as a consumers.

The next are some theories about BoP projects:

The more current usage refers to the billions people living on less than $2 per day, as first defined in 1998 by Professors C.K. Prahalad and Stuart L. Hart. Prahalad proposes that businesses, governments, and donor agencies stop thinking of the poor as victims and instead start seeing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs as well as value-demanding consumers. He proposes that there are tremendous benefits to multi-national companies who choose to serve these markets in ways responsive to their needs.

Meanwhile, Hart and his colleague Erik Simanis at Cornell University's advance another approach, one that focuses on the poor as business partners and innovators, rather than just as potential producers or consumers. Hart and Simanis have led the development of the Base of the Pyramid Protocole, an entrepreneurial process that guides companies in developing business partnerships with income-poor communities in order to "co-create businesses and markets that mutually benefit the companies and the communities". This process has been adopted by the SC Johnson Company and the Solae Company (a subsidiary of DuPont).

Furthermore, Ted London at the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan focuses on the poverty alleviation implications of Base of the Pyramid ventures. He has identified the BoP Perspective as a unique market-based approach to poverty alleviation. London has also developed the BoP Impact A****sment Framework, a tool that provides a holistic and robust guide for BoP ventures to a****s and enhance their poverty alleviation impacts. Companies, non-profits, and development agencies in Latin America, Asia, and Africa have implemented this framework*

So BoP is an opportunity area were anyone who wants to innovate adressing social problems can start.

Here is the web for the BoP protocole. http://www.johnson.cornell.edu/sge/research/bop_process.html

* Source Wikipedia