The BRINQ blog

Where was the market for Solae's protein in rural India? It needed to be created.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal published an article by my colleague Erik Simanis about our work developing new markets in the base of the world's income pyramid. Erik is a pioneer in business development methodologies for the BoP.

The Base of the Pyramid is not actually a market. True, those billions of low-income people have a lot in common. But they don't have two of the vital characteristics you need to have a consumer market. They haven't been conditioned to think that the products being offered are something one would even buy. And they haven't adapted their behaviors and budgets to fit the products into their lives. A consumer market is nothing less than a lifestyle built around a product.

Erik uses a range of examples including bottled water in the U.S., P&G's PUR water cleaning powder, KickStart's MoneyMaker pump, and our own work with Solae in India to demonstrate that companies should think twice before assuming a market for their products exists, even if those products are well designed. And if a market doesn't exist then traditional market entry approaches - the kind that most companies use and most managers are taught - are largely ineffective. Instead, companies need to learn to create markets.

Since the first BoP Protocol pilot in 2005, our work has focused more and more on the challenges of creating new markets and building the enterprises that enable them. Over the years, we have learned a number of hard, but handy, lessons. Three of those lessons are described below.

Image rendered from logos of Linked In and the BoP Learning Lab

A few years ago I was swept up in a wave six-degrees-of-separation invitations from the professional networking site Linked In, most of the invitations coming from old b-school classmates at UNC.  As a good little networking MBA, I sent out as many invitations as I could too, feeling a certain thrill in seeing the breadth of my professional and social network. However after that initial rush I pretty much forgot all about it.  “Who actually uses this thing?” I remember thinking.

Then a week ago I got another invitation from an old colleague of mine at Rockwell International who wanted to reconnect and to share the news that a patent application of ours had finally been accepted (I have two patents in my name, officially making me an “inventor”, albeit the kind that doesn’t make any money for his inventions).  This old colleague wrote, “I always wondered what happened to you after you went back to school, sounds like you’re doing some interesting things!”

Those words sent me back into the Linked In universe, searching for other old colleagues that I had missed.  And after the excitement of reaching out to old acquaintances had passed, I decided to go poking around my Linked In network. It didn’t take long before I started looking for other people who also worked in the Base of the Pyramid. About 65 connections came up, interestingly enough most of them at 2 least degrees away or more: meaning I have few direct connections working in my own field.  

"All learning integrates thinking and doing. All learning is about how we interact in the world and the types of capacities that develop from our interactions." - Presence, Peter Senge et al

A book discussion in the Amazon

One of the benefits of working in the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) has been the opportunity to take deep dives into experiences that were once totally foreign to me. Another benefit has been the long travel times between and across continents; plane flights, bus rides, and boat trips where I can immerse myself in books and articles covering a wide range of topics. [It's a sad fact that in these information-at-the-speed-of-thought days I actually have to be unplugged and forced to sit down before I pick up a good book!] Over the past several years both those benefits have twirled around my head ... like a pair of ballroom dancers continuously exchanging leading and following roles. I've never had a learning experience like my work in the BoP: this combination of thinking & doing and the knowledge that both have created.

Well, after yet another long, long absence finally an update. Old friends of BRINQ may have already noticed that there have been a few changes around here. BRINQ.com is now sporting an updated look (for the technically minded, I dumped html tables in favor of stylesheets… and forever hereafter say phooey to Microsoft and IE 6). There's an updated front page, a new Photo Gallery, content tags for articles on the BRINQ Bloq, as well as updated content on the information pages: the About BRINQ and What is the BoP? pages in particular.

The About BRINQ page describes what may have been obvious for some time now, BRINQ's change in focus. Although I started this site around my attempts to create business models to promote toy innovation in the BoP, I haven't been pursuing that effort for well over a year now. And although I originally intended BRINQ to become a company, most of the BoP consulting work I do is through Enterprise for a Sustainable World. So BRINQ.com has instead become more of a site to talk about my own work (and the work of my friends) in the BoP.