Monday, September 20, 2010
Article on innovations in distributing electricity to poor customers
Interseting article on NURU, a company that sells kits that enables people to generate electricity from bicycling for lights (and now cell-phone charging). Quite a few of the seven basic business models identified in the Monitor report are at play in making this work.
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I met with the founders of Nuru and EGG, two of the companies in this article, a few months ago, and it was interesting to hear their common challenge of weighing durability/utility from their technologies vs. the desire to offer products at an attractive price point.
ReplyDeleteWhile discussing their businesses, we used the analogy of a Land Rover vs. 4Runner to describe the trade-off: The Land Rover solution, which does everything, is tempting to strive for, but a solution that has 85% of the functionality at 40% of the cost (the 4Runner) may be more marketable. I know the effort to create products that offer the optimal util/$ value is a common challenge in off-grid lighting, and I would imagine that it is common in other industries as well.