In recent months, Boston Consulting Group's publications have tackled various aspects of BoP strategy, which Manuel and Julia have covered in detail.  From a high-level point of view, this is a positive trend, reflecting growing interest among BCG's clients – large private sector corporations – in better understanding and exploring BoP markets.  And from a branding perspective, I couldn’t be happier that BCG has chosen "Next Billion" as the catchphrase tying these publications together.

BCG's most recent publication, Decoding the Next Billion Customers (PDF), briefly but jauntily describes six ways that BoP consumers are different from other consumer segments, and provides a few hints about what this means for those interested in developing products for and marketing to BoP customers.  Mainly, these six points are common sense observations about circumstances that influence low-income individuals' purchasing decisions:

• They manage fluctuating incomes
• They cope with domestic [spatial] constraints
• They are unfamiliar with many products
• They are smart shoppers
• They look for trusted advice
• They demand respect

When compressed altogether, however, these facts and their implications present a challenging and exciting picture – especially for companies scouting around for new marketing opportunities.  What's helpful here is that BCG gets right to the visible and straightforward day-to-day differences that influence low-income customers' value calculations and decision-making without going into long narratives about their socioeconomic limitations.

(This post continues past the break; click "Read More" to continue)

Organised by: Center for International Development at Harvard University

Sponsored by: The Anwarul Quadir Foundation

Key Dates:
Submission Deadline: June 30, 2008
Results: October 15, 2008

Propose an innovative and practical idea that would improve the lives of low- and middle- income people of Bangladesh (everyone except the top-third of the population in terms of annual income). Proposals will be judged by four Harvard University faculty members, in consultation with scholars familiar with Bangladesh.

This global contest is open to any individual in the world. Any compelling essay that establishes a way to improve the lives of low- and middle-income people in Bangladesh is acceptable for submission. The essays will be rated giving equal weights to a) innovative nature of the idea; b) clarity and cogency of argument and writing; c) ease and practicality of implementation; and d) the size of impact.

The author of the winning essay will be awarded the Anwarul Quadir Prize, USD $25,000.

Find competition details at:
http://www.cid.harvard.edu/quadir_prize/

 

I'm sad to say it's time for me to sign off as a member of the NextBillion staff. I remember joining World Resources Institute and the NextBillion staff in June 2005. NextBillion had just been up and running for two months. Take a look at this old screenshot and you'll notice the site had three navigation bars, 19 navigation links, and six color blocks. We agonized over the dearth of comment submissions and had regular staff meetings about how to improve site design, increase traffic, and encourage community participation.

Over the last two and a half years, NextBillion has undergone many site make-overs, but more importantly, the quality of its information and readership have improved exponentially. We now have over 250,000 unique visitors coming to NextBillion on a monthly basis, many of whom enrich the discussion through commenting on blogs and giving suggestions for site posts and improvements. Some gratifying third-party confirmations of the site's effectiveness include its nomination for a Webby Award in 2006, and "Best of the Web" mentions in BusinessWeek and New York Times.

It is exciting to think of NextBillion's steadily growing visitor count and media recognition as a reflection of growing interest in private sector solutions to poverty, and to think that NextBillion has had some role in nurturing this trend. It's been a honor to work with Rob Katz and the site's numerous blog contributors over these years. I'm eager to follow the site's continuing evolution as the "Base of the Pyramid" field matures and the ideas discussed on NextBillion become reality.

Guest blogger Bill Kramer is principal of The Global Challenge Network, LLC, an executive education and training company. From 2001 through mid-2007, he worked on pro-poor business strategies with WRI. Previously, Bill founded a non-profit focusing on the relationship of knowledge to economic development and enjoyed a long career in the private sector, founding a dozen companies, most of which were in the book business.

By Bill Kramer

Intel and the OLPC project have parted ways. The proximate cause, according to the report in The New York Times on Saturday, January 5, was the effort by an Intel salesperson in Peru to get the Education Ministry to switch from the XO to Intel's Classmate PC for primary schools. This was interference with an existing contract for the XO and contravening prior Intel agreements not to compete directly, nor to disparage the XO through one-on-one comparison of the machines. David Kirkpatrick from Fortune has an in-depth interview with OLPC head Nick Negroponte that goes into even more detail.

The failure of this partnership is not surprising to most observers, however disappointing it may be. First, Intel, as readers of Next Billion will know, was resistant to joining the OLPC effort, but yielded last year, and agreed to cooperate in developing a new chipset and machine, the Intel XO, which was to be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show which opened this past weekend (also see this story on the CES’ greening initiative). It was going to be a rough ride for the partners. OLPC and Intel already had a history, strong personalities at their respective centers, and, on OLPC's side, a powerful vision driven by education, not commerce, as Nick Negoponte said loud and often.

These divergent visions are the second reason for this breakup. In Intel's statement on its departure from OLPC, Chuck Mulloy of Intel said, in part, "that at the core of this is a philosophical impasse about how the market gets served." Spot on, in my view. And my sympathies frankly lie with Intel on this particular issue (while, at the same time, the press report suggests that Intel behaved badly in other respects here).

My earlier posts on the OLPC suggested that the philanthropic/education orientation of the venture would prove shaky in the competitive environment of computer hardware, and that reliance on governments as the primary market could prove a flawed approach to commercial success. Prof. Negroponte has remarked ruefully that politician's headline-seeking public "contracts" with OLPC have, in a number of cases, not been followed by checks being written. More experienced (and perhaps cynical) businesspeople could have (and may well have) foretold this outcome.

(This post continues past the break; click "Read More" to continue)