Notes
2 Allen L. Hammond et al., The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy at the Base of the Pyramid, World Resources Institute, 2007.
3 Hammond et al., The Next 4 Billion.
4 Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, New York: Basic Books, 2000.
5 Madhubalan Viswanathan and José A. Rosa, “Product and Market Development for Subsistence Marketplaces: Consumption and Entrepreneurship Beyond Literacy and Resource Barriers,” Advances in International Management, vol. 20, 2007.
6 Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital.
7 Cañeque and Hart, Base of the Pyramid 3.0.
8 Mohammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty, New York: PublicAffairs, 1999.
9 Ted London and Stuart L. Hart, Next Generation Business Strategies for the Base of the Pyramid: New Approaches for Building Mutual Value, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: FT Press, 2010.
10 Ted London and Stuart L. Hart, “Reinventing Strategies for Emerging Markets: Beyond the Transnational Model,” Journal of International Business Studies vol. 35, no. 5, 2004; Stuart L. Hart and Ted London, “Developing Native Capability: What Multinational Corporations Can Learn from the Base of the Pyramid,” Stanford Social Innovation Review vol. 3, no. 2, 2005.
11 John Kania and Mark Kramer, “Collective Impact,” Stanford Social Innovation Review vol. 9, no. 1, 2011.
12 Paul C. Godfrey, More Than Money: Five Forms of Capital to Create Wealth and Eliminate Poverty, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Godfrey recognizes the importance of several types of capital in the context of poverty. His focus, however, is on individuals and how they can be leveraged to build self-reliance, rather than on the level of the market and how it can be leveraged to build companies.
13 Between 2011 and 2016, we studied for-profit companies and market-oriented nonprofits operating in low-income markets. The research project included three main phases. First, we conducted 85 interviews with social entrepreneurs associated with VIVA Idea, an organization that works with business sustainability leaders across Latin America, to better understand what assets they use when operating in low-income markets and how they identified them. We selected our interviewees based on focus groups with VIVA Idea’s experts, who helped us identify companies with the greatest experience in these markets. Second, we executed a secondary analysis of cases of relevant companies. To do so, we first reviewed 25 databases, including case studies provided by INCAE Business School, Emerald Emerging Markets, Harvard Business School, and the European Case Clearing House, for cases of companies operating in low-income markets in Latin America. We ended up with 43 cases of varying degrees of market success and analyzed the strategies of each company. Finally, over the five-year period of our study, we organized three conferences with select organizations and renowned international experts on business strategies and low-income markets with whom we shared our findings. Based on the feedback we received, we revised and refined our analyses, formulating two different perspectives—cocreation versus transfer—as well as identifying five specific types of assets that successful companies leverage in their cocreation endeavors.