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NexThought Monday : Customer Experience needs to drive vision at the BoP business, not vice versa
Base of the pyramid (BoP) organizations may arguably have some of the best intentions the private sector has to offer. But even they don’t always get it right. Many need to introduce customer experience to companies and organizations that count the BoP as customers. Customer what? Customer experience goes beyond customer service, beyond working once or twice with a representative.
- Categories
- Education
- Tags
- Management, product design
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Students develop low-cost water filtering system for African nation
In an effort to bring fresh water to rural Kenyans, School of International Affairs (SIA) students Kory Hansen and Jin Ju Kim participated in Penn State's Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship (HESE) program to develop a ceramic water filtration system for parts of the sub Saharan African nation.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Entrepreneurship
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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All About India: A Health Care Market in Transition (Part 2)
Zeena Johar is president of IKP Centre for Technologies in Public Health, and CEO of SughaVazhvu Healthcare. In this second post in a four-part series on developments and challenges in Indian health care, Johar provides insights on addressing the country’s provider shortage, and reaching rural markets.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Health Care
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Can You Really Make a Fortune in BoP Health Care?: An Interview with Paul Polak
Paul Polak has dedicated his life to promoting business solutions to global poverty. He believes there’s a fortune to be made in "radically affordable" products marketed to BoP customers. But does his approach work with the complexities of health care? And is for-profit business an ethical way of providing products that people literally can’t live without?
- Categories
- Health Care
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How the Aakash tablet bounced back
Internet-connected tablets, as I’ve explained before, have the potential to positively impact billions. Cell phones improved commerce and changed society by allowing, among other things, the poorest villagers in the developing world to connect with one another. The Internet will catalyze the next leap forward by providing those in the developing world access to the same ocean of knowledge as those in wealthier societies. This will transform education and revolutionize commerce.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- product design, technology
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NextThought Monday: Helping the BoP Design its Own Way Out of Poverty
Daniel Altman is an economist, writer and teacher with a deep commitment to international development. He’s had a revelation about the power of consumer products to create markets from the inside out, and he’s doing something about it.
Emerging Design Centers (EDCs) is a for-profit enterprise that puts cutting-edge design tools in the hands of the poor.- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Impact Assessment
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What the SOCCKET is (And What it is Not)
It looks like the prototype do-gooder-gimmick – a football (soccer ball) that produces and stores electricity, which can power a solar lantern at night. Each ball financed by Western backers, they are donated in developing countries. I had the chance to kick it at the Rio Summit – it’s a fun concept, but does it hold up to its promise?
- Categories
- Energy, Technology
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A Formula for Social Innovation?: Reflections from the UN Social Innovation Summit, 2012.
At last week’s United Nations Social Innovation Summit in New York, all manner of change agents - from social entrepreneurs, to philanthropists, industry titans, impact investors and celebrities stretched the confines of a term that, admittedly, gets thrown around haphazardly and can mean different things to different people. What exactly is “social innovation?”
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Technology
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