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The World of Globality is Not Flat
In his best-selling book The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman had shown how globalisation had flattened the differences between developed and developing countries in terms of access to opportunity and growth. In Globality*, authors Harold L Sirkin, James W Hemerling and Arindam K Bhattacharya from Boston Consulting Group, show how, over the past two decades, a range of corporations from the developing world have begun to disrupt traditional paradigm of development and tilted the balance...
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For Acumen Fund, ROI = Profits + Social Impact
The New York based Acumen Fund is a non-profit venture fund that invests in businesses that have a social and economic impact. It will invest in companies providing affordable, critical goods and services in sectors such as health, water, housing and energy. The geographies it focuses on are South Asia and East Africa, besides the US. Since it set up shop in India a couple of years ago, the fund has made equity investments in Kochi based ayurvedic chain, Ayur Vaid Hopsitals, Hyderabad-based Life...
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- VC Circle
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Understanding business models at the Base-of-Pyramid is critical for future growth: Harvard Business
Western markets are saturating and so are the urban markets of BRIC countries. This is forcing companies around the world to understand the lower income consumers living in urban slums and villages. Future of businesses lies in understanding and executing businesses models at the base-of-pyramid. That’s the message from noted marketing thinker Prof V. Kasturi Rangan, the Malcolm P. McNair Professor of Marketing at the Harvard Business School (HBS) who was the chairman of the Mar...
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The Creative Capitalism Roundtable
TIME Managing Editor Rick Stengel recently convened an elite panel of business leaders and thinkers to talk about how corporations can do well by doing good. The panelists were Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates; Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackey; Ogilvy & Mather chairman Shelly Lazarus; University of Michigan professor C.K. Prahalad, author of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid; and Geeta Rao Gupta , president of the International Center for Research on Women. Here is a transcript ...
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Mobile Banking for the Poor
At a press conference this morning in Mumbai, mobile-banking company Obopay announced an alliance with Grameen Solutions -- an alliance with an extraordinarily ambitious goal. In ten years’ time, the companies said, they would like to see 1 billion of the world’s poor -- people living on less than $2 a day -- receiving banking services via their mobile phones. It probably won’t happen, but it would be amazing if it did. Mobile banking is not new, of course, although it is ...
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One Laptop per Child Lands in India
The Indian government wasn’t interested, so OLPC partners with Reliance ADA Group to bring computers to India’s primary school kids. By Nandini Lakshman Nicholas Negroponte has found it tough going in India. For years as the head of MIT’s Media Lab, the famed computer scientist promoted radical ways to use technology to transform society. His best-known idea is the
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Spreading the Gospel
EARLIER this year Mario Chady faced a crucial decision. Having built up Spoleto, his chain of casual Italian restaurants, to 150 outlets in Brazil, and opened in Mexico and Spain, the time had come for Mr Chady, based in Rio de Janeiro, to choose between expanding into America or putting the idea on hold for at least 18 months. To help make up his mind, he asked for help from an organisation called Endeavor, which had chosen him as a potential ?high-impact entrepreneur? in 2003. Endea...
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Bank on Them
Ideas have the power to change history. When new ideas emerge, they challenge established ways of thinking and acting, and suggest alternative approaches to resolve problems confronting the world. Yet ideas can turn out to be birds without wings. Without visionary and committed individuals who can actualise them, new ideas will hardly make any difference to the lives of people. They will remain as wishful thinking and disappear without trace. Many social entrepreneurs across the w...
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