Abstract: With over 4 billion people, the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) is the largest but poorest socio-economic group worldwide. They are economically active as consumers, producers, entrepreneurs, and employees. The BoP Innovation Center provides an incubator space where organizations can develop business strategies for BoP markets in a multi-stakeholder environment. Their involvement in numerous BoP business development strategies enables them to capture, process, and share learnings about market-based sustainable innovations

A current case, which involves developing a cold storage innovation for the dairy sector in Ethiopia, illustrates the process of inclusive innovation. For effective use in the BoP market segment, cooling units have to be small in size, easy to maintain, and function with off-grid energy. Mueller, a leading Dutch company in the dairy cooling business, together with local entrepreneurs and smallholder farmers, has accepted the challenge and aims to create an effective solution.

In the 2SCALE project, a portfolio of 500 agribusiness clusters in nine target countries in Sub-Saharan Africa was developed. Within this project, market research is performed on food consumption in these countries to provide a better understanding of BoP consumers, in terms of eating habits, buying behavior, and food aspirations. Explorative interviews are also held at retail, trade, and supply-level for new insights. By including both the consumer perspective as well as the route to market, opportunities for new product-market combinations are identified. These insights can fuel innovations and new business. In this seminar, the main challenges are discussed, and discovering and understanding new ways to research the BoP market will be highlighted.

Friday, June 14, 2013

10:30am – 12:30pm

Segal Graduate School 500 Granville Street, Vancouver Room 2300 (2nd floor)

Complimentary

Wendy van der Klein is currently a learning and marketing expert at the BoP Innovation Center in Utrecht, The Netherlands. She 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, Spiral Dynamics practitioner and Partnership Broker 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.