Title: The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid : eradicating poverty through profits
Abstract: What, if anything, can capitalism do for the poorest people in the world? Or, are the poor by definition to be excluded from the ambit of the free enterprise system? Can there be such a thing as ‘inclusive capitalism?’ It is in an attempt to answer questions such as these that C K Prahalad began to wonder if there were other solutions (than those that had already been attempted by both governmental and non-governmental bodies) to the persistence of poverty in the modern world. When Prahalad began to work on this problem in 1996, it appeared that poverty was here to stay and that it could, at best, be alleviated by aid agencies. These interventions, however, ran the risk of depriving the very poor of their dignity since they were often no more than subtle forms of alms giving. The only real, sustainable, long-term solution seemed to be ‘the idea of large-scale entrepreneurship,’ but this was easier said than done. When Prahalad and Stuart Hart began to pitch the idea that consumers who lived at the bottom of the economic pyramid should be treated as ‘individuals’ who could be brought into the picture as ‘co-creators’ to solve their own economic problems, they were treated with disbelief by the academic community. The traditional idea that the poor will always be ‘wards of the state’ was hard to shake-off. The embryonic form of this book was a working paper by Prahalad and Hart in 1997. Though the paper did not immediately find a publisher, it managed to influence managers in several multinational firms to at least set up a venture fund to explore opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP). Prahalad later collaborated with Allen Hammond to take this idea further. So, by the time these ideas were published in influential academic journals in 2002, they had already made a mark. The discussion had moved from whether, in fact, there was a market at the bottom of the pyramid to how firms could get there. This book is a very human record of the journey made not only by Prahalad, his colleagues, students, and fellow workers at the University of Michigan and elsewhere, but, more importantly, by the poor whose stories represent the case material included in Parts II and III of this exemplary volume. Not only does the book begin with a theoretical framework, it also develops ideas that Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy had co-created in their book, The Future of Competition (HBS B O O K R E V I E W S
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Language: en
Type: book
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Cited By Count: 2144
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