NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

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!)