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“Hot” and “Bright” Business Models: Bringing Energy to the BoP
’We have technology - we just need a business model’ is the rallying cry for a whole lot of promising BoP projects. Many of these look good, but still face major difficulties in getting their products in the hands of people, and getting the people (or someone else) to pay for it. The "Energize the BoP!" business model generator provides support.
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NextThought Monday: When Mass Marketing Meets Global Health, the Case of Lifebuoy Soap
While the UN continues to fall well short of its Millennium Development Goals and aid agencies pour ever-more money into hygiene aid programs, Lifebuoy is taking a very different approach. The Unilever brand recently launched an effort to globalize its hand washing campaign, marketing its way towards the one billion benchmark.
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- Health Care
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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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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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Markets of the Poor: Limits and Opportunities
Marketing socially useful products to the poor offers only limited business opportunities. Still, there are some profitable opportunities and we need creative entrepreneurs to design the right business models to serve the poor. To profitably serve the poor, firms need to make the cost-quality trade-off to make the products affordable by the poor.
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- Impact Assessment
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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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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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Weekly Roundup – 10-23-11: Using Social Media to Innovate from the Bottom Up
Large corporations like Deloitte are learning the internal value of social media. But social media also has huge potential for ventures to fulfill a core component of BoP practice. Involving staff and BoP beneficiaries’ voices throughout the design, piloting and scaling process allows ventures to harness knowledge, spur innovation and reduce costs.
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- Technology
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