The Base of the Pyramid (BOP) is the largest but poorest socio-economic group worldwide with over 4 billion people. They are economically active as consumers, producers, entrepreneurs and employees. The BoP Innovation Center develops, learns about and accelerates programs dedicated to private sector led sustainable innovation at the BoP.
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Vietnam trip post #3: “Da Lat, it’s like Switzerland..â€
I had a week of visiting local government officials, extension workers, farmers and potato traders in Hung Yen and Hai Duong provinces. As none of them spoke any English, I had to rely on my fellow researcher/interpretor/friend Mr Hoi. It was a little bit more difficult to stay in control of the discussion, buy Hoi did a great job. And so did most of the respondents, in general I think it is save to say that Vietnamese are rather talkative. I especially enjoyed the farmer group discussions we had, the farmers were able to recall their farming practices of several decades ago in great detail,...Constraints as drivers for innovation
Guest contribution by Pepijn Veling
A few weeks ago, Pepijn Veling visited our office. He had just returned from his master thesis field study in Thailand, where he had spent some time with Dr. Jivacate, founder of the Thai Prostheses Foundation. Pepijn shared his experiences in an inspiring presentation during our monthly team meeting. This excerpt is a story about pro-poor innovation, driven by constraints.
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"Innovating for the poor is a challenging task. It is difficult to know what they need and how to develop affordable and appropriate... What is BoP Inc.
The BoP Innovation Center (BoP Inc.) is an independent foundation using a multi-stakeholder approach to facilitate sustainable innovations in Base of the Pyramid (BoP) markets. These market-based innovations aim to co-create a positive impact on the wellbeing of low-income people. We firmly believe that creating market-based sustainable innovations for the BoP can create a win-win-win situation for all organizations and the people at the BoP.
Key success factors
Key success factors
Current business models addressing the base of the pyramid (BoP) are not mature or well developed.
We have identified four key success factors where innovation and knowledge is needed to ensure future private sector activities in the BoP. All our projects address at least one of these factors:
BoP Incubator Space
What we are doing
The BoP Innovation Center provides an incubator space where private parties can develop their business strategies towards BoP markets in a multi-stakeholder environment. Our involvement in numerous BoP business development strategies enables us to capture, process and share learnings about market-based sustainable innovations. Learning by doing enables us to accelerate the impact and scale of these innovations.
Activity Highlight
Access to Safe Water for the BoP
This Report presents and discusses the findings and recommendations of the study ‘Access to Safe Water for the Base of the Pyramid’. Having analyzed a diverse set of innovative initiatives providing safe water to the poor we have formulated a set of considerations on how access to safe water can be brought to scale taking into account that access to safe water is a universal need and right.
BoPInc: Is 'profit' a dirty word in the world of social enterprise? http://t.co/Y5t3krMm via @guardian
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