By Derek Newberry and Rob Katz

NextBillion.net is happy to announce that, as of today, the site will be co-owned and co-managed by World Resources Institute and its newest partner, Acumen Fund. Since NextBillion.net's launch in 2005, we have admired Acumen Fund's innovative approach to investing in "base of the pyramid" enterprises and its willingness to share what it has learned along the way. We're thrilled and honored to be working with them.

What does this mean for the site? At first, not much will change. NextBillion.net will continue to post the latest base of the pyramid (BoP) news, events, research and analysis. WRI and Acumen Fund will co-manage the site, spearheaded by Derek Newberry on the WRI side and Rob Katz for the Acumen Fund team. Staff Writers will continue contributing, as will guests and other special authors.

In the coming months, NextBillion.net will add both WRI and Acumen Fund staff contributors and commentators to share the stories, lessons and BoP business ideas these groups have accumulated over the past several years. More importantly, WRI and Acumen Fund have committed resources to re-design and re-launch NextBillion.net later this year. We hope this re-design will make the site more user-friendly, enabling smoother subscription, sharing, commenting, story suggestion and a range of other features. Despite all the coming change, however, NextBillion.net will remain focused on bringing you the most relevant, up-to-date information related to the base of the pyramid space.

Adding Acumen Fund as a partner to NextBillion.net will allow the site to deepen that focus and bring in fresh perspectives. We hope that you – our community – will find this to be the case. We're happy to take questions on the partnership or about the site in general – please use the comment field below.

(Yes, we'll be making comments MUCH easier in the coming redesign!)

Guest blogger Emily Fintel is Regional Representative for Strategic Initiatives at Fundación AVINA, one of the largest private foundations in Latin America. AVINA partners with civil society and business leaders to promote sustainable development through a network of twenty-one offices in eleven countries through the region, and has invested more than $350M in partners' initiatives since 1994.

In this post, Fintel responds to Allen Hammond's series on taking Base of the Pyramid models to scale. This week, NextBillion.net will publish responses from a number of BoP experts and practitioners, followed by a concluding post from Hammond.

By Emily Fintel

My immediate reaction to Al's conversation with Jacqueline Novogratz of Acumen is that I too am haunted by the numbers. Within Latin America, which is the focus of our work at AVINA, hundreds of millions of people suffer from a series of market failures that prevent them from realizing many of the benefits that are enjoyed by middle and upper class winners of globalization. I completely agree with Al that the most promising avenues in order to make a contribution of significant dimension are those strategies which have a systematic approach and integrate a diversity of complementary actors in the development of new, socially inclusive business models and the transformation of entire economic sectors.

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Guest blogger John Paul is a Co-Founder and former Managing Editor of Nextbillion.net. He is currently finishing up his MBA at Cornell University, where he has focused on private-sector solutions to global poverty with the school's Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise

In this post, Paul responds to Allen Hammond's series on taking Base of the Pyramid models to scale. This week, NextBillion.net will publish responses from a number of BoP experts and practitioners, followed by a concluding post from Hammond.

By John Paul

The implementation of transformational sector strategies is a compelling idea, and has a number of comparative advantages over the traditional business-only approach. First, focusing on sectors takes a systems view of the problem, allowing for the identification and mitigation of bottlenecks and missing pieces that might have prevented other initiatives from scaling. Second, what is being created is a platform network that can be adapted as needed, as the examples cited of adding IT infrastructure or remote diagnostic equipment to an established distributed healthcare network demonstrate. This ensures the increasing utility, rather than inevitable obsolescence, of what is put in place. Most intriguingly, in some ways what are being developed are human capital networks, in many ways akin to online social networks.

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