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Housing Series: The Power of Collecting Accurate Data
Many companies applying market surveys for middle/upper income consumers to the BoP market have failed. We employed slum residents and community workers to get honest answers, and to use cell phones and tablets to gather and send data for analysis. The result: specific guidance for architects and developers on target markets and ideal customers.
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- Technology
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Housing Series: From the Field, Reflections From Two Dow Corning Leaders on Building a BoP Market
Dow Corning’s Citizen Service Corps sends employees around the world to see, hear and think about what new markets need, and come back ready to translate those insights into innovations and new products. The posts below are excerpts from two employees who worked on Housing for All in India as their volunteer experience.
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- Uncategorized
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Housing Series: Why Dow Corning Sends Employees to Serve BoP Projects around the World
What would happen if major global companies sent their employees to work with people in emerging economies for weeks at a time to get to know their cultures, needs and daily patterns of life? Not as "poverty tourism," but rather part of a strategy to see all that is happening and and then to think how that translates to product innovations.
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- Uncategorized
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Housing Series: Building a Strong Foundation, When Earthquakes Hurricanes Hit Affordable Housing
"Earthquakes don’t kill people, poorly built buildings do," says Elizabeth Hausler, an engineer who turned her passion and know-how for building into an international non-profit social enterprise. Creating strategies and best practices to build safe and affordable housing became her life’s work and sparked her to found Build Change.
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- Social Enterprise
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NextThought Monday: Wisdom From on High
Our PopTech Social Innovation Fellows Boot Camp takes place on top a mountain, and the symbolism is not lost on any of us. It’s an intense five days of shared ascent for fellows and faculty alike. The goal of this conversation is to give the new entrepreneurs the benefit of what these fellows already learned about managing and launching a startup.
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- Technology
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- innovation
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Housing Series: Strategies to Add Quality and Value to Incremental Home Improvement
Various stakeholders are working together with BoP communities to innovate new, inclusive and market-driven strategies to raise quality, lower costs and add technical assistance - assistance that leaves citizens not only with a sturdier roof overhead, but with increased confidence, skills and a good credit track record to build on for the future.
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- Uncategorized
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- housing
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Watch: With Smartphones, Software, Building Better Agricultural Value Chains
Funded by the Gates Foundation, African Cashew Initiative is a $48 million project that aims to raise the incomes of 150,000 smallholder farmers. From Ghana, business software giant SAP is researching how ICT software coupled with smartphones is improving efficiency and trust in the cashew value chain, from farmers to buyers/traders. (With video)
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- Agriculture, Technology, Telecommunications
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Affordable Housing for All Series: In the Race for Affordable Housing, Who Has the Head Start?
In the race for affordable housing for all, is there a clear leader? Is government the biggest player in BoP affordable housing? Are NGOs? Private construction firms? The answer might surprise you. Far ahead of the pack in resources mobilized, progress made and sheer numbers of BoP housing solutions implemented, are the BoP households themselves.
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- Uncategorized
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