Session Title:
Poverty, Profits, and Pushing Water Uphill: A Reality Check for Business and NGOs

Date of talk or publication:
December 14, 2004

Description:
The rewards for successful innovation can be considerable. But generating profits from appropriate products and processes among low-income communities is about much more than adopting concepts. Restructuring traditional business models and management thinking is a risky endeavor - easy to call for from the outside but difficult to deliver from the inside. It requires working with resistant company cultures and sweating through minefields of barely visible but fiendishly complex operational details. In short, it's about heading in the opposite direction to global cost trends, bottom line pressures, career-path signposts, reporting requirements and business controls. Energy major Shell invites you to share a stock-taking where senior executives present case studies that tell both sides of the story that invite debate about what needs to be done to shift boutique BOP concepts into the mainstream.