Follow-up from first week

Business Innovations students:

Thanks for an exciting first session--I know we covered a lot but hope you found it as excited as I did.

For next week, we will be turning to the question of "how can we create viable business models that support development by delivering basic services affordably at scale to poor people who currently lack access to them?" This concept of the "bottom-of-the-pyramid" customer was first popularized by Prof. CK Prahalad in 2004. The required readings include a short essay that captures this thinking. The Monitor Group took this concept one step further with a ground-breaking report last year examining what was really working (and not) in scaling these approaches in India. Part of the report is also required reading for next week. The co-author of that report, Mike Kubzansky, will come to class on Sept. 22 (not next week as we had planned in the syllabus) to discuss these findings and new (unpublished) research his team has conducted this year in Africa on the same topic.

For next week we will not have any outside speakers -- instead we will recap the main concepts from Week 1, discuss data that "gets below the mean" in understanding the "bottom-of-the-pyramid" market, and then focus the second half of the class on the Patrimonio Hoy case.

I look forward to seeing you all next Wednesday.

Prof. Bugg-Levine