Give the poor dignity as well as a good life

Hammond regarded the next four billion low-income people as the base of the economic pyramid in his article The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy at the Base of the Pyramid. He defined the traits of that market, which actually gave people a new way to thinking about how to serve the vulnerable population. It is an opportunity and trend which differs from the traditional way we are looking at the low-income people. It is the time for us to eliminate our assumption that "they are unable to help themselves and thus need charity or public assistance".

However, to serve this BOP market is totally different from a mature market which we are already familiar with the "game rules". The biggest challenge for us is to picture the unmet need by on-hand experience, in other words, through "observation". As Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt said in Design Thinking for Social Innovation that "A better starting point is for designers to go out into the world and observe the actual experiences of smallholder farmers, school children, and community health workers as they improvise their way though their daily lives". Without participatory thinking, the solution we designed may screw up in implementation process.

Give the poor dignity as well as a good life. It is a sustainable way to help them since the reason of their poverty may be the inequality of access to opportunities, unaffordable basic products prices, bad financial management. Their needs are our origin of social innovative products and services. However, how to create such a good products for them is a big challenge for young minds.

I have a good example of how 2 Harvard alumni served a cohort of farmers in underdeveloped area in China. They created a business model, however their market is still in the mature market while they train the poor farmers as their suppliers and helped them to build factory in local area to improve their living standard. (http://www.shokay.com/)

I am thinking these are two different models in social innovation, to serve the BOP directly and to serve the mature market with involving the poor into the supply chain.