A lot of people are talking lately about “The Long Tail,” a concept first put forward by Wired editor Chris Anderson.  (A lot of buzz was generated when his book of the same name was published earlier this month).  The basic idea, as described by Anderson, is that business is “increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of 'hits' at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.”  BOP enthusiasts – does this sound familiar?  

As I've noted before, what is often most fascinating about the work we do is realizing how adaptive the entrepreneurial spirit can be and how given a market with considerably less resources, entrepreneurs in emerging economies are finding creative ways to provide what were previously considered developed country services at heavily reduced rates. I thought about this when I was leafing through the latest issue of Forbes yesterday and ran across an article on Earthlink's next big steps in ICT. Two of its new major initiatives are designed to lower the price of internet usage to make access more affordable for a wider audience. Earthlink has created a wi-fi cloud that will soon encompass all of Anaheim (with other cities to follow) which can be accessed for $22 per month. For the second initiative, the company is teaming up with a South Korean cellular provider to distribute prepaid packages or "buckets" of phone minutes at a reduced price. What really interested me in reading this is that an ICT company in the Philippines is already beginning to provide these services at a fraction of the cost. I wondered if Earthlink had already heard of SMART Communications...

In this week’s cover story, Emerging Giants, Business Week explores the phenomenon of “innovation blowback.” For those of you not familiar with the term—like me only 15 minutes ago—innovation blowback refers to businesses from the developing world that expand into overseas markets and go head-to-head with established multi-national corporations. From what I can tell, the term was coined this year by John Seeley Brown and John Hagel in The McKinsey Quarterly. (To see Nextbillion’s review of their article, Innovation Blowback: Disruptive management practices from Asia, click here.)

So how is it possible that companies from the developing world out compete multi-nationals that have long dominated the market? The answer, it seems, is that companies that succeed in places where it is trickier to do business are more adaptable and, consequently, more likely to thrive in the hyper competitive global marketplace. “Hardscrabble origins,” Business Week writes, “can be a vital source of strength. These companies have learned to make money by developing reliable, easy-to-use goods and services at very low prices.”