Scott Anderson

Watch the Replay of Our Google Hangout: Understanding BoP 3.0 with Fernando Casado Cañeque and Stuart Hart

Editor’s note: Please scroll down to watch the live event and to view the replay.

Unless this is the first time you’re reading this blog, you’ve heard of the Base of the Pyramid as a business practice, or at least a theory. You may have heard of BoP 2.0. The updated version, albeit informally bandied about, expanded greatly on creating mutual value between companies and customers at the low end of the income scale, as opposed to mining a “fortune.” And now it would seem we’re ready for version 3.0; at least Stuart L. Hart and Fernando Casado Cañeque argue as much in their new book: Base of the Pyramid 3.0: Sustainable Development Through Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Hart and Cañeque will join us and the NextBillion community at 12:30 p.m. EST Wednesday, April 29, for a live Google+ Hangout here at NB. (And for the record, Hart, who along with the late C.K. Prahalad coined the term Base of the Pyramid, has said the “fortune” term from their seminal article “Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” was the work of a Harvard Business Review editor.)

In the new book, Hart and Cañeque critique why applications of BoP have failed and propose new methodologies for success. Several members of the Base of the Pyramid Global Network author chapters in the book, which follows five themes:

1) Designing business models.

2) Enabling a long-term ecosystem for inclusive business.

3) Ensuring access to market and addressing the distribution challenges.

4) Creating partnership frameworks.

5) Inclusive business models as a response to global challenges.

Hart and Cañeque go beyond advocating “co-creation” between companies and their less well off customers or suppliers. Instead they encourage readers to re-examine organizational and ecosystem innovations that both extend products and services to the BoP, and increase incomes.

Hart is the Samuel C. Johnson Chair in Sustainable Global Enterprise and professor of management at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management. He’s also founder and president of Enterprise for a Sustainable World, and founding director of the Emergent Institute in Bangalore, India.

Fernando Casado Cañeque, a Ph.D. economist and journalist focused on economic and sustainable development, is the associate director of the Enterprise for a Sustainable World’s BoP Global Network.

Both Hart and Cañeque are past NextBillion contributors, and you can see their articles here and here, respectively. You can purchase a copy of the book here. We welcome your questions and comments to help ensure a lively discussion, so please leave them in our comments section, on our Facebook page or Tweet them to us @NextBillion.

Above: Fernando Casado Cañeque (left) and Stuart Hart.

Scott Anderson is the managing editor of NextBillion.net.

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