That’s often the initial response when people hear of the $30 cell phone that Motorola is building for emerging markets. Or the $185 internet access device (a PC, except that you can’t load new software on it) that AMD is shipping to India and the Caribbean. Or a nifty little home water purifier that can supply a family’s needs for $10 a year (to be launched in India this summer).

But when the product or service is designed to meet the real needs and circumstances of bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) communities, low price can also mean superior quality. An affordable basic GSM cell phone (with text-messaging) is what most individual BOP customers need. The AMD device not only boots quickly, but is intended to have much lower support costs than a normal PC—a critical feature in communities where technical talent is scare. And the water purifier? It’s based around a new, nanotechnology filter that has passed US EPA and California quality standards and will remove bacteria and viruses that pass right through the Brita filter in your refrigerator—its better and it needs to be, for the billion + people without safe drinking water. More about these examples in my next post, but I think we’re seeing the beginnings of a wave of sophisticated technology built into products designed explicitly for low-income markets, and that will provide superior quality at very low prices.

Underwriters Laboratories Inc. (UL), Chicago, and the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology announced that UL will provide a $25,000 grant to support the institute’s efforts to design cost-effective ways to transport and distribute drinking water in the slums of Mumbai, India. The initiative is part of the institute’s Design for the Base of the Pyramid project, which aims to create new products and services that improve daily life and generate sustainable economic growth in the developing world’s impoverished cities.

Europe's Hypermarkets Under Fire

This economist.com story (Retailing in Poland) makes an interesting point - how do consumers react when large multinational companies enter low-income markets? In this case, so-called hypermarkets (similar to American Wal-Mart stores) have been gaining market share over local small businesses, and not everyone in Poland is pleased. Making things worse are allegations that some hypermarkets have been exploiting their workers, not paying them overtime and subjecting them to poor labor conditions.

SciDev.net has created a new dossier on R&D:

This dossier, compiled under the guidance of an international panel of advisors, brings together a range of articles that cover topics of direct relevance to understanding R&D policy in developing countries. It contains policy briefs, opinion articles, news items and features, as well as links to key documents and relevant organisations, that provide a brief but essential guide to this issue.

Inspired by this Time Europe article.

Many commentators have noted how movie stars turned heads at the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos, in their efforts to drum up support for dealing with poverty. They also shifted attention away from—and may have undercut—perhaps the most promising attempt to reduce poverty and improve quality of life, namely efforts by large and small companies to find sustainable business solutions to the conditions that plague the poor. While Sharon Stone was galvanizing a packed house with her pledge to give $10,000 for bednets in Africa—she raised more than $1 million on the spot—a much smaller audience heard the Chairman of Unilever, the CEO of the 2nd largest bank in India, the CEO of Visa, and Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer talk about what their companies are already doing—business activities on a far larger scale—that will improve opportunities for or bring benefits to tens of millions of low income
households.

The conference left a powerful impression—of huge companies and NGOs more or less on the same page, of governments and aid agencies endorsing business approaches to poverty, of entrepreneurs and visionary CEOs from enterprises in developing countries being recognized as pioneers in new business strategies. But most of all the impression was of people and their energy and excitement over an emerging new approach to development. You can revisit some of that through the videos and speaker presentations posted under Conference Resources. We have tried to sum up the wealth of ideas and discussions in the posted document that covers both the plenary sessions and the more hands-on workshop tracks.

One of the strongest themes to come out of the 'Eradicating Poverty Through Profit' conference was the need for companies to develop a deeper understanding of their target market's needs before developing products and services that intend to fulfill them. 

This report addresses some of the challenges of assessing the needs of people at the BOP.  Although it refers specifically to defining community needs for the SARI telecenter project in Southern India, the lessons learned by the field researchers are applicable to all businesses looking to better understand their target market through surveys and outreach.  Challenges cited include:  local villagers having little ability or basis on which to judge the costs and benefits of unfamiliar technologies, the researchers themselves contaminating the results with their own biases, and the delicate balance between patient research and the implementation of a business model. 

I  wanted to draw people's attention to one of the more excting areas of this new site - the NewsRoom. When we were designing the site - we searched for appropriate RSS feeds that could be featured on the sidebars.  What we found was that there is no single good source of news on this subject - so we created our own.  Also very cool is the News Archive where we have articles that go back to January 05.  The variety of sources and range of stories - all with a development through enterprise theme - is really incredible.  Have a look around.