Joomla Software solutions Template

Our new intern in Prakti, Eloise, has to write an article about innovations in social entrepreneurship in India! As soon as her great report will be achieved, I'll publish it in this blog!

For the moment, I try to help here with some documentation gathered by the reading of the "bible" of every BOP-guy, the C.K. Prahalad "The Fortune at the bottom of the Pyramid" (or how eradicating poverty through profits).

First episode today: about BOP and CSR. More to come in days to come...

I don’t know why, but I can’t really hate this book ! After all, it looks like the bible of BOP thinkers. Or, better, of it neo-liberal faction. It’s also hard to avoid a strange feeling : yes, guys, you can quietly think about poor people as your next frontier, your market for the future.

It’s always the same problem, the issue microfinance had to face last decade : either you are small, local, close to your “clients” and to their needs, and you are beautiful. Or you choose to grow (maybe you are already a big player in your industry, with enough money and resources to become directly a big player also towards your new target, poors), and you start talking about processes, scalability, you introduce managers between you, the guy who have the vision, and your fieldstaff, you mix more and more efficiency and poverty fighting. I don’t laugh after, it is really an issue. I personally lived (and suffer !) the way from local experience to growth and I know how it is hard to keep the way as more and more people, money, politics… start to work with you.

That’s why I’m culturally careful about growth and love “local” stories, small-scale players that invent. Hopefully, big ones take their ideas to reproduce and go further, but that a dangerous step someone should analyze one day !
By the way, writing this paper has been the way for me to understand the proximity of innovative and social enterprises. Read below to understand !!

Well, to go back about The fortune is a the bottom at the pyramid. The title is quite explicit, and C.K. Prahalad, it writer, started the fashion of “Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP)” with a paper co-writed by Professor Stu Hart (Michigan University), “The Strategies for the Bottom of the Pyramid”. It took sometimes for this alternative theory to arise. Thanks to the web and to the support of big companies (HP, Monsanto, DuPont…), a fund has been quickly launched to support first initiatives.
I found the edition of 2007 of “The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” in Chennai this week and will try to describe you what it is about.

The main topics is about how NGO with their creativity and MNC (multinational companies) with their efficiency can co-create a market from the needs of the 4 billions of people (80% of the world population all the same !) living with less than 2$ a day in the world.

BOP and CSR

The first relevant distinction Prahalad do is about CSR and BOP. We are not talking here about Corporate Social Responsibility, or how to introduce good practices in a company, but about a specific marketing and finance branch, a way to make concrete business with a special target. BOP is not a moral issue, it is a segment of a market, and why not after all, poor-rural-strange habits wouldn’t deserve to be treated as the less than 50 years woman or the new-young-urban-kids ?