I'm struck by the seeming convergence of a number of new options for providing/generating energy in rural BOP areas. Wind-up radios and pedal-power water pumps are already succeeding commercially in Africa. Photovoltaic packages look promising for powering cell phone and other mobile device chargers, and may be a good match to power low-voltage WiFi wireless data networks and new hyper-efficient LED light sources. New work on the genomics of cellulose-digesting and ethanol-fermenting organisms may lower costs and widen markets for ethanol fuels, already a success in Brazil, creating both local substitutes for petroleum-based products, export markets, and jobs.

Q. So you really think this whole movement is going to drive itself?

Yes. Eventually, the spoils will go to those who figure out how to do it. And if those who figure out how to do it come from the developing world, then those are the companies that are going to be the companies of the future.  I would bet on the companies that are rising up from the developing world, the companies that are coming from Latin America, from Africa, from India, from China. Those are the companies that are cracking the code, that are figuring out how to do this first. And as a result, they have a beachhead, a strong position to work from, and then to move their way up, over time.

My colleague and first mentor in BOP business strategies, Stuart L. Hart, is one of the world’s authorities on the implications of sustainable development for business strategy. Stu is S.C. Johnson Professor of Sustainable Global Enterprise at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, from which post he teaches, does research, and runs the Base of the Pyramid Co-Laboratory. With C.K. Prahalad, Hart wrote the pathbreaking 2002 article “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” which provided the first articulation of how business could profitably serve the needs of the four billion poor in the developing world.