When our WRI team sat down to brainstorm a name for new web portal and community, it wasn’t evident at first that “NextBillion” made sense. One colleague pulled the Big Mac card: NextBillion was too close to McDonald’s signature “billions and billions served” tag line. Despite the absence of good french fries, we settled on our name thinking it conveys that the next billion customers will bring the next billion of profits – all while serving low-income communities.

Nokia may have been listening – or vice versa. According to a Wall Street Journal article, the cell phone giant has borrowed from our brainstorming session: “...Cellphone makers see great promise in the developing world, with Nokia Corp. dubbing the opportunity as the ‘next billion’ users.”

Nokia sees it in terms of users; others conceive “next billion” in terms of profit. It doesn’t stop there - what does it mean to you? Comments are open.

Click to view Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the interview.

What are the biggest challenges to creating Sustainable Local Enterprise Networks? How can these be overcome?

For all the great examples of SLENs that we described and that are featured on the NextBillion web site and elsewhere, there is no doubt that we are only scratching the surface of the true potential for what the UN has termed the ‘Unleashing Entrepreneurship’ agenda. The system conditions are simply not yet in place for this to take off yet. Trade rule disparities, political and institutional vested interests, the absence of property law and a whole range of cultural and economic disincentives to private enterprise get in the way.