Design thinking to penetrate developing countries

Like the article, New Business Models in Emerging Markets, says, when we think of penetrating developing countries, we tend to just cut the price or lower the number of items in a package. However, unfortunately, it doesn't work for most of the cases. The reason is because the current product people are using in some specific developed countries are not what people in developing countries want. Without understanding of the real needs and concerns which they are facing, it is hard to make a product to penetrate the market. I believe design thinking is the good way to approach this. As the following article says, "for Base of the Pyramid (BoP) markets, a design must account for three aspects in particular: affordability, attractiveness, and appropriateness". And it is applied for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) as well.

"Design Thinking and Effective Technology"
http://www.uniteforsight.org/effective-program-development/module9

And to understand what people in the market really need, ethnography is really important. So people do field work in the market for several months (or more) to understand the people's behavior in the market, and design the products to penetrate the market by using the result of the fieldwork.
Often, solutions to the developing countries are really out of box ideas for people in developed countries. For example, we can't come up with the physical features for OLPC. And those out of box ideas sometimes bring good inspiration / innovations for developed countries as well. So I believe for even profitable companies, it is good idea trying to penetrate developing countries not only to expand their market, but also expand their ideas.