Session Title:
Innovative Solutions

Date of talk or publication:
2005

Speaker Name / Title:
Tony Salvador, John W. Sherry, Joydeep Bose, Herman D’Hooge, Louis W. Agatstein, Lawrence Carr

Organization:
Intel Corporation

Description:
Intel Corporation has enacted a radical transformation of its approach to new market opportunities in the developing world. The direct ethnographic experiences of the first two authors are related in an “overture.” Three subsequent “acts” trace how a particular product, announced as “under development,” is wending its way through the corporation with the goal of addressing the emerging part of emerging markets.

Multinational corporations might have sound business reasons for engaging with global populations in which aggregate rather than individual wealth is of primary interest. Firms in the information technology industry, in particular, seem to have obvious reasons: information and communication technologies (ICTs) are crucial to delivering the efficiencies and reach needed to enable new product and service offerings, new business plans, and engagement of previously untapped market segments. New technologies play an important role in market-driven approaches to economic development by facilitating aggregation of demand, reducing the costs of communications, travel, and other expenses, and enabling new forms of entrepreneurial activity.

Intel Corporation has long engaged in projects and activities conceived to have an impact on so-called emerging markets. Indeed, many new technology offerings, in particular those developed around wireless networking, seem to offer the promise of a leap-frog effect. Yet most such offerings were the happy by-products of other market segment strategies. Only recently has the company established an organization with an explicit focus on creating innovations to serve the “bottom of the pyramid,” or at least the “next billion” people.

A case history of how this came to be begins with ethnographic research grounded in practices and theories derived from the social sciences in places where digital technologies have not established themselves. This research was conducted by the first two authors, then members of a group of social scientists (People & Practices Research Group), to drive strategic and technical innovation at Intel from a deep understanding of the daily practices, beliefs, and values of ordinary people from all walks of life. The work began as a project conceived to provide Intel with a better understanding of what it would take to radically increase the reach and benefits (whatever they were) of digital technology. Among other outcomes, this research identified many elements that must be in alignment to support the ownership of and derivation of value from ICTs. A Community PC was developed together with four “platform definition centers” (located in Bangalore, Cairo, Sao Paulo, and Shanghai) charged with doing the qualitative, end user, market, and technical research to enable, through the creation of locally relevant ICT products, the development of local ecosystems of economic production.