Stuart Hart Discusses Backlash Against BOP Concept

Ali Goheer - 5 November, 2007 Format for printing

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So already we're beginning to see backlash on this idea which should be totally predictable. In fact we anticipated it going back 3-4 years with this base of the pyramid protocol that I mentioned earlier. The pushback you know, is the following that you know, when you hear something like the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, the first thing that that conjures up is okay, so it's now ... now we've got large corporations going in there to exploit the poor people. You know to sell them stuff they don't really need and just extract whatever you know, whatever cash they've got for their own profit line. You know, so the idea that the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid is extractive, that it's about just marketing to the poor you know, selling stuff to poor people, that's become a real source of pushback and backlash to some degree. Because frankly some of that's going on. I mean for better or for worse this is the way you know, the competitive system works. It's not centrally controlled. It's not centrally planned. There're gonna be people that do nasty things and that's tragic. But I guess the way that I look at it and the way we've tried to frame it is that the companies that figure out how to do this in a triple bottom line kind of way, right, the ones that are actually able to shadow this tradeoff that the ones that figure out how to create sustainable livelihoods for those in the base of the pyramid collaboratively, and in a way ... and to codevelop the idea, to introduce next generation inherently clean technology and then also to build the business of the future are the ones that are ultimately gonna win and they will ultimately out-compete the hit and run you know, short-term profit exploiters, 'cause they're out there. They're out there and we should expect that that will come and it's really unfortunate and it's really tragic but in the end of the day, I think the competitive system will clean them out, right, that that's ... from my point of view that's how this idea really gets legs and how it has the potential to really address the poverty problem in the world more than the aid based approach.