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If you're interested in the power of design and design thinking to address the challenges of poverty and environmental degradation, please read on. If, on top of it, your schedule is open for next weekend and your budget allows you to, book a ticket to Providence and grab a seat at the fascinating conversations that will take place at the Better World by Design conference.  

I remember reading with curiosity about Cooper Hewitt's Design for the Other 90% exhibition a little more than a year ago. It is promising to see how, in such short time, it has grown into a movement of its own within the base of the pyramid conversation, thanks to the leadership of people like Amy Smith, Paul Polak and Paul Hudnut. Not only is it taking off in the academia. It is also beginning to mainstream into the traditional design practice. For example IDEO, one of the world's leading design consultancies, has embraced the concept and created a set of initiatives under the umbrella of "Design for Social Impact".

The conference will be hosted by BetterxDesign, an initiative of the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University. Speakers will include figures like Paul Polak, Jocelyn Wyatt, Niti Bhan, Cameron Sinclair and Iqbal Quadir. Interesting panel discussions include one on Social Entrepreneurship (which will feature Sami Nerenberg, who teaches a Design for Social Entrepreneurship course at RISD), Appropriate Technology for the Developing World (featuring Kickstart) and Urban Housing with the participation of Architecture for Humanity.   

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This fall, Jocelyn Wyatt and I taught a seven week course at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, which spanned the worlds of philanthropy, business and many of the way points in between. We were both Acumen Fund Fellows (class of 2007) and as part of our post-Fellowship goals each of us wanted to find a way to get teaching experience and also share what had learned over the past several years. 

As good luck would have it, our next steps took us to San Francisco a year ago (David via Mercy Corps and Jocelyn via IDEO) and through one of the student leaders we met at the Global Social Venture Competition, we were asked to teach a one-credit course held for two hours each Thursday.

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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:

• The D-Lab family of classes (development, design, dissemination) encourages students to develop affordable, low-tech inventions that have high impact on citizens below the poverty line in developing countries;
• Students in the NextLab course (part of The NextBillion Network initiative) research, develop and deploy mobile technologies for the next billion mobile users in developing countries such as Ecuador, India, Mexico and Zambia;
• The Global Entrepreneurship Lab, MIT's flagship international internship course is being extended to include practical challenges in Global Health Delivery for resource-poor settings in Africa. Graduate student teams apply professional management skills, tools and approaches to pressing real-world problems that their hosts define, drawing on their classroom learning to work on the ground to create effective improvements that provide patients with the healthcare they need;
• The X-Prize Institute is a unique program currently running a course that challenges students to think of the types of breakthroughs that might generate revolutionary breakthroughs in the energy sector. Last spring, the Institute ran a course around designing incentives for health innovations in the developing world;
• The S-Lab (Sustainability Lab) is unique in engaging students and faculty in developing an integrated framework for sustainability (including social equity, economic development and environmental regeneration). The course culminates in a three-month consulting project in which teams of students work to solve the real-world sustainability problems of one of the program's partner companies. Course coordinator Sarah Slaughter says that S-Lab provide students with a strong perspective of the challenges and opportunities in sustainability. Projects must be core to the operations of the host company, and should move forward the broader sustainability movement. (See two related interesting articles in the MIT Sloan alumni magazine). S-Lab is also helping other universities in introducing sustainability in their curriculum;
• The International Development Group is an example of how this interest in development has extended beyond business and engineering into design. IDG investigates the urban, regional, and national socioeconomic impacts of major public and/or private investments, and addresses problems of squatter housing, municipal finance, metropolitan sprawl, and social disparities at a variety of scales;

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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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One of the biggest differences between social ventures and traditional for-profit ventures is that social ventures have an explicit social mission.  This difference can be a significant reason why one person chooses to work for a social venture over a traditional for-profit venture, regardless of any difference in pay. Despite this, there are many who decide to work at a social venture for reasons other than the social mission. 

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After having devoted my last posts to more abstract aspects of the base of the pyramid, Jim Rosenberg, from our sister organization CGAP, kindly brought me to the ground again with an e-mail about how to connect the BoP to Internet through their mobiles.

The beauty of the mobile phone phenomenon in developing countries (and the reason for its success at the BoP) is its capacity to build linkages between people and markets, thus helping generate wealth in the short and long term for the agents involved thanks to a connection that previously didn't exist. The growth of it has been dramatic: Since 2000, the yearly growth of mobile phone subscribers has averaged 24% and only a few weeks ago, the International Telecommunication Union (United Nations's branch dealing with telecom issues) stated that mobile phone subscribers were likely to reach 4 billion before the end of 2008.

The BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are expected to account for over 1.3 billion subscribers, with China alone representing more than 600 million. India, on the other hand was estimated to have 296 million subscribers back in July, yet its penetration rate is still around 20%, suggesting ample opportunities for growth.

Now, having a mobile phone represents not only an opportunity for generating connections between two users, but also an opportunity to connect with a network which is estimated to include 1.5 billion people, the Internet (about 26.6 billion pages). However, while the developed world is well served by extensive submarine fiber networks the question remains on how to enable the BoP's connection to the Internet.

Jim mentions two possible paths:

1. Incredible as it may sound, using a satellite system. In fact, Google, Liberty Global (the world's leading international cable operator) and HSBC signed a month ago an agreement with 03b networks to being deployment of a new global communications infrastructure, comprising 16 satellites to provide high-speed, low-cost Internet connectivity to emerging markets. Service activation is scheduled for late 2010.
   
2. A longer-term answer might lie in a different technology which has been also touted in its own right as an interesting solution to electricity shortages in the BoP (but not quite there yet): light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, for short. Boston University's College of Engineering is launching a program to develop the next generation of wireless communications technology based on visible light instead of radio waves. If successful, this initiative would develop an optical communication technology that would make an LED light the equivalent of a Wi-Fi access point.

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The William Davidson Institute at The University of Michigan recently launched an exciting new tool for educators and others in the emerging markets and international business spaces. A remarkably transparent resource, GlobaLens offers cases, courses and community through a user-friendly database and discussion platform.

The site's course and syllabi-sharing section is a particularly unique opportunity for faculty members to identify innovative teaching strategies and approaches to learning.   Beyond encouraging collaboration domestically, GlobaLens has great potential to leverage international partnerships and break down geographic barriers.  If effectively utilized, universities could enhance a their course offerings to include a more comprehensive diversity of perspectives.  At a fundamental level, they can simply talk to each other about what works and what does not work in teaching international business across a multitude of disciplines.For readers interested in social enterprise and businesses serving the base of the pyramid, the site offers access and easy navigation of great case studies.   Ted London's case on Acumen Fund with co-author Moses Lee and on Scojo Foundation (now VisionSpring) with co-author Molly Christensen, for example, go beyond the basic case depiction of the organization and the problem or opportunity it is facing to include detailed metrics, growth strategies and financials.  The "How to Make the Greatest Impact" case on Acumen Fund includes a full portfolio summary, including debt and equity disbursement and social returns measured thus far.  For an entrepreneur interested in taking VisionSpring's "business in a bag" concept to another product idea, the case provides a list of materials and visuals to help contextualize how Vision Entrepreneurs actually conduct business.

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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

Nobody should make light of the terrible toll that the current global financial crisis; it will cause human hardship domestically and across the world, and hit vulnerable populations with particular vengeance. But an article in The New York Times from Thursday, October 16, 2008 ("Asia Looks to Its Own Consumers To Bolster the Region's Economies"), points out that there are two sides to this firestorm: export sales are weak, but in a number of sectors, in a number of countries, domestic sales are actually on the rise.

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Chip Ransler is the co-founder of Husk Power Systems (HPS), a for-profit company that cost-effectively converts rice husks into electricity. HPS utilizes a proprietary technology to run 35-100 kilowatt mini power plants, delivering pay-for-use electricity to un-electrified villages in India's "Rice Belt." HPS' five pilot projects have become operationally profitable within six months, delivering sustainable, environmentally-friendly, low-cost energy that is dramatically improving the lives of rural Indians.

Chip is also a Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow.  We sat down this week at the conference for an interview.  For more context on Husk Power Systems, check out their profiles in Virginia Business (Chip and his business partner, Manoj Sinha, are MBA candidates at the University of Virginia) and Rediff.com.

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You're sick, so you go to the doctor.  He prescribes you drugs.  The medicine makes you better, right?  Unfortunately, that's not always the case – especially for the billions of people living at the base of the economic pyramid. 

Taylor Thompson and Nathan Sigworth are on a mission to make sure medicine makes patients better, every time.  They are the co-founders of PharmaSecure, a for-profit startup targeting the problem of global pharmaceutical counterfeiting – which kills millions each year.  PharmaSecure will soon launch a cell phone-based system that allows healthcare professionals and consumers to easily confirm the validity of purchased drugs, bridging the information gap that allows counterfeiters to sell more than $50 billion worth of fake drugs every year.

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