On November 10th, I have the privilege to sit on a panel at the Hass School of Business at UC Berkeley to discuss base of the pyramid business models with Katie Schmitz from Water Health International and Israel Moreno from CEMEX's Patrimonio Hoy Program. Sponsored by the Berkeley Net Impact Club and Sustainable Products Solutions Program, the panel is part of a year-long series exploring whether capitalism can evolve towards genuine sustainability.  Assistant Professor Isha Ray from the Energy and Resources Group at Berkeley will moderate the panel. More details on the seminar below.  Hopefully many of you will be able to join!

 

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Capitalism Next Seminar
Date: November 10, 2008
Time: 6 - 8 pm Location: Boalt Hall, Room 110 (UC Berkeley)
Note: Local, organic refreshments and drinks to follow

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"If people don't have a job, they don't have hope. And if you don't have hope, what do you really have?" (George Roberts of Kohlberg, Kravis Roberts & Co., the founder of REDF)

Recently Jocelyn Wyatt and I were fortunate to have Carla Javits, the President of REDF (originally named the Roberts Enterprise Development Fund), as a guest speaker in our class at Berekely's Haas School of Business.  REDF is a nonprofit based in San Francisco that creates job opportunities and pathways to employment for people with significant barriers to work.  It was also one of the first organizations to embrace the venture philanthropy approach, serving as both a model for others in this field, notably Acumen Fund, and a testing ground for Jed Emerson's ideas on measuring social returns.

For most people, even those who may be facing homelessness, having a job is one of life's top priorities, and creating opportunities for those who might otherwise be unemployable is the main focus of REDF's efforts.  According to Javits, REDF's approach falls squarely into the arena of venture philanthropy.  "We concentrate on achievement of an overall goal and deploy all the resources at our disposal to meet those goals.  We treat our activities as investments, and we expect to see a return on those investments measured by jobs, changed lives and reduced public costs."  And, like a venture capitalist, REDF has a high engagement, hands-on approach.

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Al Hammond - a NextBillion.net Staff Writer and one of the site's progenitors - is featured in a short video produced by his new employer, Ashoka. In it, Al describes why he moved over to Ashoka and what he's doing there - specifically, he tells viewers about his work mentoring 7 pharmacy franchise startups around the world. Al's been a mentor and a friend for many years, and it's good to see him doing well. Click here or view below.

Position: Research Intern

Location: Amsterdam or Bloomfield, NJ

Organization: E+Co, a non-profit investment firm focusing on clean energy enterprises in developing countries, is seeking a qualified graduate level (Masters) student for research and writing assignments. The internship will last 3-6 months with flexible degrees of workload. E+Co cannot offer any remuneration. The intern can be based near one of E+Co's offices in Amsterdam (NL) or Bloomfield, New Jersey (USA) or the work can be conducted remotely supported by e-mail and phone calls.

E+Co is non-profit investment company that invests business support services and capital in energy businesses in Africa, Asia and Latin America. With almost 15 years of experience and offices in 10 countries, E+Co's innovative business model provides lasting solutions to climate change and poverty.

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"Who are they?" Melanie Edwards asks us.  Frankly, we don't know – and neither does the government.  These are the people of Morro de Macacoes – Portuguese for "Hill of the Monkeys" – and they are among the 1 billion people worldwide whose existence has no official record.  

Imperfect or non-existent information characterizes base of the pyramid markets worldwide.  When Edwards began working in Morro de Macacoes (a slum near Rio), she asked government officials how many people lived there.  The answer ranged from 5,000 to 60,000.  She saw this disparity as a business opportunity; after all, how can businesses, banks, governments and NGOs serve people's basic needs if they don't know who they are?  Edwards' company, Mobile Metrix, is founded on a simple principle: that accurate information on the invisible is the first step to solving poverty.  Or, as she told me, "[We are] not just about changing lives and counting lives, but about making those lives count."

Melanie Edwards launched Mobile Metrix to identify and serve the world's one billion "invisible" people after a career with J.P. Morgan and the United Nations, among others. The market research and distribution company connects those at the base of the pyramid to critical products and services – including pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, voting registration, and job training.  Mobile Metrix accomplishes this by hiring, training and equipping local youth – in Brazil and other developing nations – with hand-held mobile technology that is used to gather demographic data, door-to-door. The company also develops, administers and analyzes surveys for corporations, governments, NGOs, foundations and local communities.

At the recent Pop!Tech conference, I had the chance to sit down with Melanie – a 2008 Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow – for a short interview.

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Last month, NextBillion ally and BOPreneur Paul Hudnut reported on his blog that Envirofit, a company he helped start, had already sold 10,000 high-efficiency cookstoves to BoP consumers in India.

This week, Envirofit announced that it was ramping up production to meet demand - though not on Paul's blog.  Was this higher profile?  Judge for yourself:


And there's more:


Congrats to Paul and the Envirofit team.  I'm sure their friends at Shell are pleased, as is their sales team.

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

Since the publication of The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy at the Base of the Pyramid, a number of others have taken up the challenge of better defining the poor and their needs.  Their findings are based not on theory handed down from above, but rather on hard data developed from below, in low-income communities themselves.  I point to two here: Mobile Metrix and heat maps that inform a new UNDP program and study. Accurately characterizing the BoP has proved to be a slow and difficult process, and these efforts are worth noting, both for their contributions to the field and for a reason I put forth at the end of this post.

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NextBillion returns this year to Net Impact's annual conference, which this time will be held in Philadelphia at Penn's Wharton School of Business. Titled The Sustainable Advantage: Creating Environmental and Social Value, it will be Net Impact's largest conference up to date with more than 2,000 registered attendees.

NextBillion will not only be at the conference but also provide extensive coverage of the sessions most relevant to the conversation about market-based approaches to fighting poverty and environmental degradation. Given the magnitude of the event and the amount of content worth covering, I will be joined by a group of talented writers that include my colleague in WRI and New Ventures Kelly McCarthy, NextBillion Staff Writer Mark Beckford (who will be moderating a panel about low-cost computing businesses in the developing world), as well as a team of MBA students from Thunderbird, the Johnson School at Cornell, UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and maybe even Michigan's Ross School of Business.

One of the sessions in the conference will actually be hosted by my colleagues at WRI's New Ventures project and will feature a conversation about the role of entrepreneurs in shaping tomorrow's markets.

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Guest blogger Jocelyn Wyatt works for the design firm IDEO, leading its base of the pyramid projects. Prior to joining IDEO, Jocelyn was an Acumen Fund Fellow in Kenya. She holds a MBA from Thunderbird. Jocelyn blogs at Design and Reach.

She sent us the following post following her attendance to the Better World by Design Conference last week in Providence, Rhode Island.

By Jocelyn Wyatt

The Better World by Design Conference was hosted last week by Brown University and the Rhode Island Design Institute (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island. I attended the conference as a speaker and was impressed that the event was entirely student organized and run. The conference drew about 200 people from the design industry, private sector, social sector, and academia. We heard from a good mix of practitioners, consultants, and researchers.

The conference mapped closely to IDEO's Design for Social Impact initiative so it was very much in-line with the work we've been doing for the past year. Just as way of background, the purpose of IDEO's design for social impact work is to cause transformational change in communities of need.

One theme that was repeated throughout the conference was the importance of developing empathy. We heard from Ross Evans (founder of Xtracycle and World Bike  and Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity,  about the need to live and eat in the communities we are designing with. We must work to understand the complexities of the local context and be sure to work closely with local partners. While this seems like an obvious tenant of design, many people at the conference shared market insights but didn't share stories of people or human insights. We need to make sure that we're looking not just as what's for sale at markets and what is being advertised, but that we actually talk to people about what they want and need.

A second theme which was emphasized at this conference as well as at the Design in the Developing World panel at SoCap, was the need to apply design thinking to business models, distribution systems, and marketing. As Emily Pilloton, Founder of Project H said, "design is easy; implementation is tough."

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Following Jocelyn's post and just to keep the conversation going about the role of design in the development through enterprise field, here are two recommendations for your typical Tuesday afternoon.

First, please go over to Ethan Zuckerman's blog and read why good design and innovation are constraints-driven. You'll have a laugh or two (Ethan's writing simply takes you places) and you'll feel inspired by his insights and by the stories he delivers.

Then (or before that, if you'd prefer) take a look at the following video and see how good and smart design can help you deliver a simple message in an elegant, touching and impactful way. I'm sure many of you will have seen it already, but I think it's worth playing over and over (with your speakers ON).  

Today I am posting the results of a unique partnership and a novel experiment in furthering social entrepreneurship, the fruits of an effort launched on this site a year ago.

The partners were Santa Clara University's Global Social Benefit Incubator and World Resources Institute, and the attached white paper bears the names of Jim Koch (of GSBI), myself (then of WRI, now with Ashoka: Innovators for the Public) and Francisco Noguera, who has continued the water work at WRI.

The idea was to extend the scaling impact of the GSBI by recruiting a cluster of social enterprises within a single sector for the 2008 class, to add research on the sector as a whole, to involve water experts as well as the silicon valley VCs and CEOs in mentoring process of the water enterprise cluster so as to use them to provide a preliminary benchmark for the sector-and then to share what we learned so that other water entrepreneurs worldwide could build on that knowledge. 

The sector cluster was planned as 6 enterprises but, in the end, was only four (things happen!), so the database is less robust that we had hoped, and our conclusions must necessarily be more tentative. Yet it is clear to us that we have identified scalable models-both business models and low-cost technology-that are likely to be of use elsewhere.

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Guest blogger Sami Nerenberg is an adjunct faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design, teaching the advanced studio Design for Social Entrepreneurship. She also is a member of the Grain collaborative and previously worked for the nonprofits, Design that Matters and Greenblue.

Co-contributors to this article include Alan Harlem, Caitlin Cohen, & Marina Kim.

By Sami Nerenberg

This weekend I had the honor of participating in Brown/RISD's first ever Better World by Design conference as both a workshop leader and panelist discussing the role of design in social entrepreneurship. This year's Social Entrepreneurship Panel was moerated by Alan Harlam, Director of Social Entrepreneurship at the Brown Swearer Center. Joining the panel were Caitlin Cohen, Co-Founder of Mali Health Organizing Project, Marina Kim from Ashoka's Global Academy University Program and myself.

Three panelists and one moderator, all from different backgrounds, came together and set out to discuss the following: 

1. What is design?
   
2. How does design play a role in social entrepreneurship?
   
3. How do interdisciplinary groups of designers, engineers, business men/women and more, come together to work effectively?

Well, there are some simple and not so simple answers to these questions.

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It has been a fascinating morning, not without a funny feeling of nostalgia. A year ago I was logging in to read about the happenings at the Net Impact conference during my breaks writing essays and completing business school applications. In all of them, I tried to make sure to state my interest in joining a chapter and become part of this community.

A year later I am at the conference, not as a student but with my colleagues from WRI. I'm also running into familiar faces like the remarkable folks that were going to be my classmates at Michigan's Ross School of Business.

Take Nina Henning, for instance. I met her back in January when I went to visit Ross and to attend a Forum organized by their Net Impact chapter. Although I ended up not going to Ross, we have been able to keep in touch, even during her summer internship at Acumen Fund. She is a strong leader and I very much look forward to seeing her whereabouts once she finishes her dual degree next year. She will ignite significant change in the world, there's no doubt in my mind about that.

Now that's only Nina, and she's far from being alone. There are many (many!) like her this weekend in Philadelphia; more than 2,400 of the world's best-prepared people, business students, engaged in discussion about ways in which business can be an engine for social and environmental sustainability, for hope, for justice. That is the Net Impact Conference and this NextBillion's first post from it.

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Last Saturday morning was gray, rainy and windy in Philadelphia, but it didn't keep the Net Impact conference from building momentum. I began the day attending a session led by the Base of the Pyramid Protocol team. It was interesting to get a closer feel of this tool; a detailed wrap up of the session will be posted here in NextBillion by its organizers (NextBillion co-founder John Paul, Patrick Donaheau, and others) so stay tuned for that.

Once the session wrapped up I walked down to prepare for the next panel "Unreasonable People: The Role of Entrepreneurs in Shaping Tomorrow's Markets". It was moderated by Virginia Barreiro, New Ventures global director at WRI, and featured panelists Agnes Dasewicz from the Grassroots Business Fund, Ben Powell from Agora Partnerships and John Elkington, co-founder of Volans Ventures and author of the book that inspired the panel's title.  

WRI's New Ventures team decided to host this panel and spark a conversation about the role of intermediaries like those represented by the panelists in supporting entrepreneurial solutions to the challenges of poverty and environmental degradation. We believe that the conversation was timely due to the critical stage that this "sector" and the world's economy as a whole is undergoing. As expected, the panelists and an audience of ca. 80 students and professionals delivered a dynamic and thought provoking session.

Following is a summary of the issues discussed. (By the way, several questions remained unanswered after the panel due to time constraints; if you are interested in following up with the panelists on any of the topics discussed, please comment below. We'd be glad to keep the conversation going here in NextBillion).

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I had the opportunity to attend the Tech Museum Awards ceremony last week in San Jose, California.  What's interesting about this annual event is not just the social entrepreneurs and their sometimes quite remarkable innovations, but also the way Silicon Valley turns out to honor them and, at least for an evening, to focus on applying entrepreneurial skills to benefit poor people. This year the event was attended by some 1,500 people including many of the Valley's wealthiest and most powerful Venture Capitalists, CEOs, and networkers.

The mix of enterprises changes every year.This year was especially rich in BoP energy enterprises with seven entries. The prize winner was Distributed Energy Systems India, or DESI Power (desi means land or village in Hindi), which builds biomass power plants to generate electricity in villages that lack access to it. DESI trains locals to run the plants and also incubates local businesses that need power and enlarge the customer base for the model.

A wearable solar lighting system that stores up power in a cellphone battery and yields several hours of light in the evenings and technology for modifying diesel engines to run on virtually any plant oil were also intriguing.   

Highlights of a health cluster were Medmira, which has developed inexpensive rapid diagnostics for HIV and Hepatitis, and Star Syringe, the prize-winner, which develops syringes that only allow one use, thus preventing disease transmission by needle reuse.

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