We are delighted to host a seminar by SoPP's own Prof. Suma Athreye on the topic "Inclusive Innovation for the Bottom of Pyramid customer: It's a Matter of Survival!" on Tuesday, the 21st of February 2023, at 5pm. See details about the talk below. We look forward to seeing you there!
Title: Inclusive Innovation for the Bottom of Pyramid customer: It's a Matter of Survival!
Speaker: Suma Athreye, Professor, SoPP, IIT Delhi; Link to bio
Venue: LH 621
Date and time: 21 February 2023 (Tuesday), 5-6.30 pm
Abstract: The private sector provision of inclusive innovations to "base of the pyramid" (BoP) communities, offers large social rewards but also poses varied challenges for private sector actors such as multinationals, domestic firms and non-corporates. Our paper develops a framework mapping out the challenges encountered by firms introducing a new inclusive innovation product during the design, production, marketing, adoption, and diffusion phases (DePMAD framework). We validate the framework, by examining the problems encountered by 51 (published) case studies of inclusive innovation products. Only 40% of the innovations these published studies report, survived six years later. Furthermore, innovations introduced by non-corporate entities survive more often than those by corporate entities (Domestic and MNE). Exploratory QCA and univariate analysis show the existence of alternative paths to survival and highlight the key role played by partnerships in survival. We find that not all chasms are equally important in explaining survival patterns -- design and adoption chasms are encountered more frequently and are also more fatal.