Lessons from working with Social Enterprises
Aisle Manager at Nakumatt By the end of my most recent project, I was convinced that the label “Bottom of the Pyramid” (or Base of the Pyramid) also known as “the BoP” was one of the biggest barriers for organizations seeking to serve these emerging consumer markets in the informal economies of the developing world. […]
Putting people first: the difference between “what” and “why”
Pondering the topic of contracts and creativity in yesterday’s post made me think about problem areas, how they’re identified and how they may be deconstructed. In simpler terms, the difference between the “what” and the “why”. Take two regions in a country, one far more fertile and having a better overall economy than the other. […]
The problem with contracts: rigid agreements trying to predict a creative process
The title of this post has been lifted from an email conversation with Dirk Knemeyer, where I was sharing my frustrations with a recent challenge I faced during the course of my work. I want to explore this further in writing, particularly since tweeting about it for the past couple of days helped me feel […]
Immersion in rural Kenya
We start the immersion phase of our project tomorrow and leave for our first location in rural Kenya today. Our focus is to better understand household consumer behaviour and our methodology is inspired by the early stage of the human centered design process. Ukambani has been the traditional homeland of the Kamba people for at […]
Why so much “BoP” marketing fails in the developing world
Increasingly I have been getting the sense that there are some fundamental issues with the way BoP focused organizations are developing, creating and implementing their market entry strategies. Here are four of the most obvious errors that I’m seeing: Assuming there’s no competition Most of these firms, particularly those coming in from the outside and […]
Human centered design: Surprising insights from rural Kenya
One of the most surprising things that struck me over the past couple days of running around doing recce visits for our upcoming rural research was just how rapidly and how well the concept of the user centered design (UCD) process and thus, the human centered approach to research and development was not only understood […]
M-PESA and the service innovation framework (extract)
A former student of mine just mailed me this article “Extracting Key Lessons in Service Innovation” (pdf) by S.Wooder and S. Baker, recently published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management, January 2012 edition. Here is the abstract of the article: This paper describes how Sagentia—working with Vodafone, Safaricom, and other organizations—played a significant role […]
Influence of global communications among the BoP audience
Recently, this call for action by Infodev was shared with me and I was pleased to notice that they’ve referenced one of my former projects – the Finnish BoP project funded by TEKES and conducted by Aalto University. Now that was a challenging one to wrestle down into some kind of viable action plan but that’s […]
The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly – a user centered approach to aid programmes
Approaching William Easterly’s recent book on foreign aid and economic development challenges in the ‘third’ or ‘developing’ world from the design thinker’s point of view has been an eye opening exercise. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has written a mixed review evaluating Easterly’s thesis and approach, while other reviews include the London Book Review’s balanced summation. […]
Raising some concerns about urban user research insights being applied to design for rural markets
The Rural Market Insight Group at the Centre for Development Finance (CDF) conducted a six-week product test with a Base-of-the-Pyramid (BoP) household in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. The purpose was to explore whether urban user testing of rural-targeted BoP products yields relevant user insights in early design stages. Surprising results warrant further research of this potentially […]
