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Best of 2013: Product Development for the Poor: A crash course in human-centered design
Nearly 95 percent of new product launches fail every year. That’s 95 percent of the ideas that were considered pretty good by smart marketing executives in boardrooms who make decisions about what products to launch. These product ideas withstood hundreds of hours of focus group testing and strategic planning sessions, and they represent millions of failed investment dollars. So what’s wrong?
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- Uncategorized
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The Best of 2013: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Mobile money as a retail payment system
You may be tired of hearing about mobile money, but the world is not. For instance, the GSMA keeps ramping up its count of mobile money deployments across the world: today’s number is 191. Let me dig under the hype and give a personal assessment of where things are - be it good, bad or ugly.
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- Technology
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8 Defining Milestones in India’s Social Enterprise Landscape
As India celebrates its 67th year of freedom on Thursday (Aug. 15), it seems poignant to pause and reflect on eight milestones that have played an important role in shaping India’s social enterprise landscape and the lessons they teach us.
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- Energy, Social Enterprise
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The Best of 2013: Measure for Measure: Eight tips to optimize your data collection and maximize your impact
So, you want to learn more about your impact, or about the preferences of your customers at the BoP. It’s time for you to run a household-level survey. But how do you get started? Part 2 of our Measure for Measure series lays out eight things to keep in mind when developing survey content and processes for impact assessment.
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- Education, Impact Assessment
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- research
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Best of 2013: Geeks vs. Quacks: How Swasth Health Centers is out-competing informal providers
In India, trained doctors face stiff competition from informal providers, whose services are affordable and popular despite their lack of qualifications. But in Mumbai, Swasth Health Centers is out-competing the quacks, using technology and management savvy to offer superior services at surprisingly low prices. CHMI’s Rose Reis visited them to see how they’re doing it.
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- Health Care
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- public health
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The Best of 2013: Do the 4 P’s of Marketing work for BoP Businesses?: Solutions, Access, Value, Education (SAVE) might be a better guide
The famous 4 P’s of the marketing mix (product, price, promotion and place) has been a little limiting for businesses looking to sell to the BoP, as it puts more emphasis on product strategies than on the current trend of "selling solutions." Instead a Solutions, Access, Value, Education (SAVE) model might have a bigger impact.
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- Uncategorized
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The Best of 2013: Bridging the Gap with Early Capital for BoP Models: An impact evaluation of VisionSpring in El Salvador
It’s natural for impact investors to focus on companies with measurable social impact and financial returns. But they often overlook models with impact potential that are still in their pre-commercial phase. This lack of early stage capital can limit the development of promising businesses, leading to missed opportunities for the poor and for investors. That’s why the IDB’s Opportunities for the Majority initiative offers grants to pre-commercial pilots like VisionSpring’s eye care model in El Salvador.
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- Health Care, Impact Assessment
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What’s Next for Impact Investing : How to bridge the ‘Pioneer Gap’ and support entrepreneurs in the earliest stages
Announcements of impact-branded seed funds and investor networks have become so commonplace they no longer seem novel. However, the fact is most are structured to only invest in companies that are already succeeding and ready to scale. The resulting Pioneer Gap – best captured in the Monitor Group and Acumen Fund’s “From Blueprint to Scale” report – has been exposed.
- Categories
- Investing
- Tags
- impact investing
