The Base of the Pyramid Protocol: Beyond Basic Needs Business Strategies

By Erik Simanis, S. Hart, Duncan Duke. Innovations Technology Governance Globalization, 2008

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Looking back over the half-dozen years since the publication of “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” we are reminded of the adage, “your greatest strength is your greatest weakness.” Arguably the greatest strength of that seminal paper was the simplicity with which the authors communicated an altogether complex and audacious vision: Corporations, by thinking of and engaging the world’s four billion poor as they would any other market segment, could address the material deprivation of the poor while generating significant profits for the firm. The paper rendered the complex, even intimidating, language and discourse of poverty and development into one to which managers could relate and, more importantly, one on which managers could act. Doing development was a question of doing business with a different customer. The result has been nothing short of catalytic: the number of conferences, initiatives, and papers on the subject matter has exploded, corporations across the globe have launched BOP, or Bottom of the Pyramid, ventures, and Peace Corps graduates are seeking out top MBA programs as a means to channel the passion that brought them to the Peace Corps in the first place. “BOP” has emerged as one of the most powerful management buzzwords of this decade. Simplicity and clarity, however, have come at a price. Reducing the complex meaning of “poverty alleviation” and “development” to the managerially accepted language of “customer needs” and “product development” gave managers a way to get their arms around the challenge, but it also led them to adopt a strongly “economistic” notion of poverty. This mental image has been further reinforced and validated by corporations’ traditional skill sets and capabilities. The lackluster development impacts of initial BOP ventures have led the nonprofit and public sectors, which initially extended cautious support for the concept, to voice increasing dissatisfaction. Some almost seem to feel they were duped, and that the BOP is little

Subfields: Accounting, Business and International Management, Management of Technology and Innovation

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Citations in the corpus

The empty rhetoric of poverty reduction at the base of the pyramid (2012, background): “…is a serious lack of empirical support for the win-win proposition: many early BoP experiments such as the Philips health care and stove projects in India and Nike’s World Shoe project in China did not produce the profits or the poverty-reduction impacts they were meant to (Simanis et al., 2008).”
Food value chain transformations in developing countries: Selected hypotheses on nutritional implications (2013, background): “…that include traditional FVC retailers (street vendors, wet markets and ‘mom and pop’ stores) oriented to low income consumers in urban areas (who are increasingly demanding convenience) as well as smaller markets in remote, rural areas (Pitta et al. 2008; Simanis et al. 2008; Karnani 2007).”
Resources and Governance in "Base of the Pyramid"-Partnerships: Assessing Collaborations between Businesses and Non-Business Actors (2014, background): “They all regard the BoP as customers and aim at providing them with adequate goods and services as illustrated by the classical “BoP 1.0” idea (Simanis et al., 2008).”
Sustainable Supply Chain Management in "Base of the Pyramid" Food Projects - A Path to Triple Bottom Line Approaches for Multinationals? (2013, background): “0” (Simanis et al., 2008) or “integrative BoP” (Hahn, 2009).”
Creating mutual value: Lessons learned from ventures serving base of the pyramid producers (2010, background): “While business ventures have long recognized that meeting customers' needs will enhance performance, the BoP literature emphasizes the importance of reconsidering conventional wisdom on perceptions of the poor (Simanis et al., 2004; Simanis et al., 2008).”
Marketing in subsistence marketplaces: consumption and entrepreneurship in a South Indian context (2008, background): “Equally, the perspective that they must be considered as producer contexts has been emphasized ( Hart et al. , 2008”