The BoP Innovation Center has a core team of passionate professionals with complementary skills and experiences from a variety of backgrounds, including business, research, public policy and development aid.

Myrtille Danse - Executive Director   Myrtille is an internationally recognized expert on the intersection of business strategy and sustainable poverty alleviation.   She facilitates the design of enterprise strategies and poverty alleviation approaches for low-income markets, developing capabilities of new market entry, building cross sector collaborations, and evaluating the sustainability impact of business ventures.

Myrtille has almost 20 years of experience on value chain development and inclusive business strategies with Multi National Enterprises and local private sector in transition and developing economies. This experience was obtained as a project leader of numerous international business development projects in Europe, Africa, South East-Asia and Latin America. Her experience as a private sector advisor, including more than 8 years in Central America- policy advisor and trade attaché of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and advisor on local private sector development for an international NGO on development cooperation, enables her to mediate between the private sector and vital societal actors required to develop successful pro-poor market-based innovations.

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Nicolas Chevrollier - Program Manager   Nicolas is responsible for Scaling & Enabling Environment at the BoP Innovation Center. He is a passionate International leader with over 12 years of experience at the intersection of innovation, business and development.   He initiates, builds and nurtures partnerships with industrial partners, international organizations, public authorities, NGOs, and social entrepreneurs to develop and scale BoP ventures.

Prior joining the BoP innovation center, he was the deputy manager of the programme "Innovation for Development" and the" ICT for Development" team leader at TNO, the Dutch Organization for Applied Scientific Research.

Adding to his international experience, Nicolas had been a guest researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), USA, to carry out his PhD work and an international volunteer  for the international organization "Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie" in Madagascar.

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Helene Mancheron - Marketing & BoP Insights   Hélène has 19 years of experience with a leading European multi-national company with competencies in sales, marketing, new business development and high performance team coaching.

During this dedicated career at the consumer division of Philips, she has successfully led marketing activities of established categories and also pioneered a start-up venture from idea to market calibration to deliver a sustainable innovation to the Base of the Pyramid.

She loves to challenge, coach and motivate people to find their key competencies and intrinsic motivation to create business value.

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Taco de Nies - Business Development   Taco has more than 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur and board-level executive in the private sector on strategy, strategic service design, transformational change and bringing innovations to market in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Taco is inspired by leading and implementing concepts for extreme users, so called pro-poor innovations and is fascinated by trend that these innovations can and will be off global relevance. Rarely is there a single answer to a complex problem. Instead, he believes in an approach that helps spread a system of solutions.

His understanding of success at both a macro and micro level, and his  ability to hone in on large strategic objectives while paying attention to details allows BoP Innovation Center to help organizations on initiating and scaling pro-poor innovation.

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Nelleke van der Vleuten - Learning & Alliance Building   Nelleke is responsible for Learning & Alliance Building at the BoP Innovation Center. She is a development specialist with a professional passion to facilitate networking and partnerships for poverty alleviation between seemingly different worlds.   To the BoP Innovation Center, she brings her experience in ICCO as specialist for cooperation with the Private Sector and senior programme officer for India and Bangladesh.

Nelleke was account manager for large civil society organisations in the area of sustainable economic development. During five years in Share People she developed the concept of exchanges as an innovative tool for cooperation between the corporate sector and the development sector.

She has been a researcher, policy advisor and consultant on gender issues in international relations and continues to focus on the need for a gender perspective in inclusive business. Nelleke has a MA in social sciences/anthropology.

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Rutger Bults - Matchmaking   Rutger is an experienced and passionate networker, able to connect with organisations and people with different interests to reach the objectives of both companies and people living at the Base of the Pyramid.

Rutger builds upon his experiences at NCDO (Business in Development) and BiD Network, as an organiser and project manager in between the private and public sector.

His master thesis for Political Science (IR) contains a literature review on the liberal perspective on poverty and how this developed over the last century into a more 'inclusive' form of capitalism. Rutger also has an MA in Corporate Communication.

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Thom Sprenger - Strategy Advisor   Thom has more than 20 years of professional experience, with a strong focus on facilitating, managing and monitoring innovative public private alliances with a concrete development impact.   As senior partnership advisor of the Dutch minister for development cooperation, he was amongst others responsible for developing and implementing a government wide program stimulating innovative partnerships, contributing to reaching the MDG’s (Schokland fund).

Before joining BoPInc, Thom was the senior coordinator of Amsterdam Initiative against Malnutrition (AIM), bringing together leading organizations in the field of food and nutrition, including businesses (Unilever, DSM, AkzoNobel), Dutch government, GAIN, knowledge institutes and NGO’s. AIM´s focus is to develop and co-creation market-based solutions for low income groups in Africa. He worked in many countries in Africa, South America, the Indian Sub-continent and the Middle-East.

He holds an MSc of Wageningen University.

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Wendy van der Klein - Learning & Alliance Building   Wendy started her career at the Global HR department of Unilever working on HR and Finance Transformation projects as HR/Change Manager Europe.   During this time she successfully developed European and Global Unilever HR processes and thrived developing and implementing large change programmes within a complex and dynamic International environment.

After taking a sabbatical teaching children in Guatemala, Wendy decided to work as a consultant in the area of Corporate Social Responsibility. As Partner of strategy agency The Terrace she helped many profit and nonprofit organizations define their corporate social responsibility and to activate the CSR strategy towards the market, product innovations and in the internal organization. She has a professional passion for facilitating transformation from an integral perspective creating collective impact for a better world. As a coach and Spiral Dynamics practitioner she loves to motivate teams to collaborate on a common agenda for solving a specific social problem. Wendy holds a Master’s degree in International Business Studies.

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Benjamin van der Hilst - Business Development   Benjamin is working as an inclusive innovation developer at the BoP Innovation Center. He holds a master in Innovation Management. During the last phase of his studies he has developed a strong passion for market-based pro-poor innovation. He wrote his thesis on inclusive innovation systems and the role of intermediaries.   Currently Benjamin is involved in the 2-SCALE programme, as well as several other initiatives.

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Mayke Harding - Learning & Alliance Building   Having worked and lived substantially in various developing countries, Mayke became passionate about enhancing and unlocking good practices and pro-poor solutions in particular. This requires systematic learning and reflection, in particular where it involves actors originating from various cultures and sectors.

Mayke has a masters in International Development Studies and a professional track record in development cooperation in the field of capacity development and local private sector development (SMEs). Over the last 17 years, she has worked for a range of  organisations such as local civil society/grassroots organisations, development NGOs, DGIS and the International Labour Organisation. In Central America and Vietnam she was an ILO coordinator of SME business development service programmes. Before she came to work with BoPInc she worked as learning expert for a Dutch umbrella organisation for peer learning amongst development NGOs. Private sector development and CSR have been a red thread throughout her career.

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Martin Ruiter - Administrator

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Eric Wildschut - Business Development Manager   Eric engages corporate firms to co-invest in food chains, in order to upgrade agribusiness clusters and serve low-income markets. He has degrees in business economics, marketing and finance from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Eric has 20 years of experience as business strategist and innovation executive.

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