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

Several questions keep cropping up for me in this line of work.  One is whether the expectation that the private sector as presently constituted can, or ever will, have meaningful impact on poverty reduction.  That question keeps me awake only a few nights every month.  Another, which occupies more of my daylight awake time, is whether what we in the rich countries are learning about the BOP can be applied at home. 

A variant of this question has recently entered the U.S. presidential race - in the form of Republican accusations that Senator Obama's views are "socialist" because he said he "wants to spread the wealth around."   As the McCain team uses the term, it is just a proxy for the debate over economic philosophy and policy.  What are "equality" and "inequality"?

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At NextBillion.net, we follow the various universities leading innovation in base of the pyramid strategy and research.  It gets better when this research leads to actionable, practical solutions for development. 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is becoming a center of excellence for market-based approaches to poverty alleviation throughout its entire ecosystem. I was excited to learn about a number of initiatives at the university driving development through enterprise. Even as I was writing this post, the MIT Global Poverty Initiative was running Poverty Week at MIT, featuring dozens of events and spotlighting the biggest problems facing humanity.

Base of the Pyramid Curricula:
MIT faculty and lecturers (including, for example, Amy Smith, Iqbal Quadir, Rick Locke, Ken Morse, Diane Davis, Alex "Sandy" Pentland and Anjali Sastry) have been leading various BoP-focused curricular innovations that bring together students from different disciplines and combine academic discussions with field work. Not surprisingly, these courses are popular enough to have a waitlist of interested students. Here are just a few examples:

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