Acumen Fund's Pakistan Office is currently seeking highly qualified applicants for the position of Business Development Manager.

Location: Karachi, Pakistan

Organization: Acumen Fund is a global non-profit venture capital fund serving the four billion people living on less than $4 a day. Its objective is to create a blueprint for building financially sustainable and scalable organizations that deliver affordable, critical goods and services that elevate the lives of the poor. Acumen Fund invests debt and equity in enterprises delivering critical goods and services to the poor in South Asia and East Africa.

Position description: The Pakistan Business Development Manager will play a senior role within the Acumen Pakistan office in Karachi, working closely with the Pakistan Country Director to develop and manage Acumen Fund’s fundraising, community building, knowledge-sharing and talent management activities in Pakistan. The Business Development Manager will also work with other members of Acumen Fund’s global business development, portfolio strategies and talent teams to position Acumen Fund to maximize outreach in the community and support the portfolio teams in building pipeline. The Business Development Manager will report to the Country Director.

To download the full position description, qualifications, and information about how to apply, please visit the Acumen Fund Opportunities website.

Some links for you to kick the post-lunch work

slump:

• BP innovates for the BoP
  Via Perspective 2.0, an article on Oorja - a BP stove that runs on biomass pellets instead of wood, which is a more common fuel source for cookstoves in rural India... sounds very much like that of an SME in China; our own New Ventures entrepreneur Yunnan Zhenghong. Read and compare for yourselves!
  
• Going green as a strategic risk
  Via PSD Blog - E&Y reports on the risk companies face in not going green right now - not inherently BoP related, but it made me wonder whether major reports exist on the business risk of not productively engaging BoP markets...
  
• Purchasing patterns on unpredictable incomes
  Another hit from Perspective 2.0: Niti Bhan gives a rundown of the four types of buying patterns at the BoP.
  
• Is Africa misbranded?
  Brandchannel.com wonders whether the intense focus on Africa as a destination for charity has negatively branded it as a basket case, and explores possibilities for rebranding the continent.
  
• Social entrepreneurs seek new investment to reach a ‘tipping point'
  Via Rob's post at Acumen Fund Blog a Chronicle of Philanthropy article on the tipping point entrepreneurs are looking for in terms of widely available investment capital - similar to the tipping point microfinance is reaching today.

Guest blogger Erik Simanis is Co-Director of the BoP Protocol project. Erik co-founded the Base of the Pyramid Learning Laboratory in 2000 with Professor Stuart Hart. He holds a BA in Spanish from Wake Forest University and an MBA from the Kenan-Flagler School of Business (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill); he will soon complete his Ph.D. in strategy at Cornell’s Johnson School of Management.

Editor's note: Simanis' thoughts were initially posted as a comment to Derek's recent post, BoP = 1, SME = Global.  They have been adapted, with Erik's permission, as a full-length post.  NextBillion.net encourages debate on different business approaches within the BoP movement.

By Erik Simanis

Thanks for this post, Derek, and for the reference to our work on a corporate innovation process for the BoP (aka, the BoP Protocol.) I did want to make a small correction/addition to your description of that process. Importantly, the BoP Protcol is NOT about how to do "deep listening," nor simply how to understand the BoP customer's "true needs." We contend that such an approach, which reflects a very traditional corporation innovation process, is (counter-intuitively) the reason why so many of the initial corporate BoP ventures have produced lack-luster results, both for companies and communities. It also leads to weak competitive positions for the company and exposes them to low-cost knockoffs.

The problem, therefore, isn't a lack of "good customer data" or new methods (like co-creation or quick ethnography) to get that data; the problem is the very belief that new businesses (particularly in the BoP) are built on "customer data!" When you do business development with that as the organizing framework, it inevitably leads to a transactional relationship with BoP communities and fosters the view that the company's primary interest is simply to "sell stuff to the poor."

The BoP Protocol, instead, is about how companies can engage in "deep dialogue" with BoP communities and, through that process, to creatively marry each others’ resources, capabilities, and imaginations in forging a new business.

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