How much momentum does the “base of the pyramid” hypothesis have behind it – and at what point does hope become hype? I recently read Untapped, the latest business/strategy book to discuss underserved markets and their profit potential, with a wary eye – would it live up to the hope, or fall victim to the hype?

In this post, I review Untapped and interview two of its co-authors, John Weiser and Michele Kahane. Our conversation covers Untapped's five "success factors" for the BOP, why some companies haven't succeeded with their BOP projects, and what's in store for the future.

In the late 1800’s, Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant in the United States, set out to document New York City’s teeming tenements on the Lower East Side.  His finished product, How the Other Half Lives, was an immediate success and is now recognized as a canonical work of American sociology.  By calling attention to the day-to-day activities of New York City’s forgotten underclass, Riis, along with a handful of other Progressive Era reformers like Upton Sinclair, catalyzed a political movement that would change the course of American history.

Here at Nextbillion, my colleagues are working on an equally ambitious project, which, in many ways, mirrors Riis’s 19th century work.  From what I have seen, their project, Tomorrow’s Markets, is a 21st century answer to the problems that Riis first identified in the 1890s.