The BOP concept champions new thinking and new ways of doing business in the world’s poor markets. While this high-level aspiration is not necessarily new, the current concept, also known as B24B (business-to-4-billion), was coined by influential business academics C. K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart a few years ago in a working paper, which then became a series of important and well-cited articles.
These authors made the simple, yet powerful observation, that 4 billion people remain outside of the global market system. The BOP concept frames this stunning fact as both a tremendous need and real opportunity for corporations. The BOP represents a vast, unexploited, multitrillion-dollar marketplace. F or companies struggling with maturing markets, floundering business models, and serious questions about who their customers of the future will be, these are important markets to crack. But tapping into these overlooked markets will require companies to reconfigure their business assumptions, models, and practices.
From a societal perspective, the downsides to not addressing these failures of development are becoming poignantly clear as well. As Joseph Stigliz wrote in his 2002 book, Globalization and Its Discontents, “Globalization today is not working for many of the world’s poor; it is not working for much of the environment; it is not working for the stability of the global economy.”
At a fundamental level, something is awry with our current global system. More than ever, then, a positive future for the planet depends on a new paradigm that links business and development and promotes social, economic, and environmental stability around the world. Business, broadly defined, is a dynamic process of value creation; one high-leverage approach is to tap these intrinsic virtues to ensure ecologically sound wealth-creation opportunities at the BOP level.
Corporations, in particular, can play an active part in this through experiments and creative solutions both small and large, and by thinking more broadly about their role in society. It boils down to a question of market design and alignment: As business strategist Michael Porter succinctly put it, “We are learning that the most effective way to address many of the world’s most pressing problems is to mobilize the corporate sector where both companies and society can benefit.”
“ Reperceiving Business from the Bottom Up”, GBN Working Paper by Nicole Boyer, http://www.self.org/news/GBN_BOP_Paper.pdf
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WRI invited FMCN to organize the first national forum in Mexico , about this the new business model “Base of the Pyramid”.
The forum took place on September 1 st , 2005 with the support of ASHOKA, International Development Bank, CESPEDES and the University of Cornell in New York .
For further information, you can visit the following web sites http://www.basedelapiramide.org
http://www.nextbillion.net
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