methodology

The Base of the Pyramid (BoP) Protocol is a process of collective entrepreneurship that enables Multinational Corporations (MNCs) to forge lasting business partnerships with income-poor communities in order to co-create businesses that mutually benefit the MNC and the communities. The Protocol does this by forging lasting partnerships with income-poor communities through mutual dialogue and joint learning, by co-creating new businesses embedded in the local cultural infrastructure, and by creatively marrying the MNC’s resources, technologies and capabilities with those of the community. The BoP Protocol helps MNCs and communities co-create new BoP markets that recognize and derive genuine value from the business’s products and services.

Social entrepreneurs are individuals who recognize a social problem and employ entrepreneurial principles to build innovations, systems, and organizations to overcome that problem. Social entrepreneurs focus primarily on creating positive social change in societies, whereas the traditional business entrepreneur focuses more on creating profits and positive financial returns. Although some social entrepreneurs operate in the for-profit world, many operate in the non-profit world of Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) or in government.

British economist E.F. Shumacher used the phrase appropriate technology in his 1973 book “Small is Beautiful” as an answer to the large-scale use of “inappropriate technology” in international development: usually technology transplanted from the developed world that was so ill-matched to the cultural, environmental, and economic realities of the poorer nations that the technology either simply didn’t work or created new problems.

A disruptive innovation is a new technological innovation, product, or service that eventually surpasses and uproots a dominant paradigm or player. The disruptive innovation theory explains why new firms armed with relatively simple, straightforward technological solutions can sometimes beat powerful incumbents, often creating entirely new markets and business models. The theory is also a powerful draw for many companies to enter the BoP, who hope to use BoP markets as a place to create and incubate disruptive innovations.

Franchising is a process by which working business models (and their associated technologies and systems) are licensed to other parties. Microfranchising, therefore, is the licensing of “micro” or small-scale business models to operators in the BoP. The actual size of a microfranchise may vary, from business models that provide supplemental income to a single individual to ones that provide full-time employment to a group of owners or workers.

Simply put, co-creation refers to creative acts that involve more than one person or organization. In business marketing terms, co-creation is often defined as the direct and active involvement of end users in the design of products and services. One powerful example of co-creation is the open source software movement, where development of software is open, distributed, and often involves both users and the original developers. For the BoP, co-creation has been used by Stuart Hart et al.

The most famous example of a microfinance institution (MFI) is the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which was founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammud Yunus. In 1976 Yunus,a former economics professor, gave a $27 loan from his own pocket to a group of woman in the village of Jobra. The group’s successful repayment and the positive impact of the loan prompted Yunus to found the Grameen Bank, which in the 30 years since its inception has given out some $6 billion dollars in loans to 7 million borrowers.

Participatory Development was first formulated in the mid 1970’s amidst a growing awareness that the post World War II international development efforts were having little impact on global poverty. Up until then, the dominant development methodologies had been based heavily on a colonial mindset: top-down planning, centralized control, outside experts mandating the “correct” paths to development, and the plowing over of complex diversity to make way for controllable uniformity.