In February 2005, I applied to be part of the team to test the BoP Protocol™ in Kenya with S C Johnson. I came to Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management to shift my career from management and strategy consulting towards sustainable enterprise. I was focused on developing the skills and experience necessary to help companies towards financial, social and environmental sustainability. Having worked with and studied under Stuart Hart for a year, I knew about the Base of the Pyramid Protocol™ and had become theoretically convinced of the profit opportunity and sustainability need for multi-national companies (MNC) to increase their involvement with poor consumers, the BoP. Therefore, I was quick to apply for the opportunity to work on this innovative business process, the BoP Protocol™, in Kenya with S C Johnson.

A quick note about the BOP Protocol. The Base of the Pyramid Protocol Project aims to generate insight into the processes by which firms can identify and develop sustainable new products and business models in partnership with Base of the Pyramid (BoP) communities. The Protocol is envisioned as an inclusive, "open-source" effort that embraces diverse perspectives and experiences in an on-going conversation to expand our understanding of how corporations and BoP communities can work together for mutual gain.

As early as March, we were preparing for our 2½ months in Kenya with weekly calls to get to know each other discuss preparatory readings including articles from development, strategy and anthropology practice our Swahili and work out the detailed logistics and workplan. The preparation also included background on the SCJ Kenya business and ApproTec (now KickStart), the NGO partner we would be working with for the first month of the project. At the end of May we headed to the airport, newly minted antibodies coursing in our veins, and arrived in Nairobi as the Kenya BoP Protocol Pilot Team.

Once in Kenya, we set about implementing the first phase of the Protocol and its three in-field tasks:

• immersion and engagement,
• needs and assets identification and
• idea generation and evaluation.

We jumped right into it and within a week of our arrival had volunteered for a community clean-up in Kibera, Nairobi's largest slum. Shoveling and raking plastic bags, bone, paper and other waste out of open sewers is not a regular business development activity but our willingness to literally get down and dirty showed our commitment and was the start of our forging an important and valuable relationship with the community.

During this exercise we met several youth group members, all living in various slums, who were part of Carolina for Kibera's "Taka Ni Pato" ("Trash Is Cash") program. Carolina for Kibera is a community based organization (CBO) that has established a youth sports association, girls' center, and medical clinic, all with the mission of helping the residents of Kibera. The program had helped the groups set up trash collection, recycling and composting businesses in Kibera. Clients pay them for trash collection and the groups sort the waste for recyclables and compostables, both of which they can sell. We did not yet know that these groups would become crucial partners for our Protocol work, for SCJ Kenya and for the development of a new route to market that would deliver the benefits of SCJ's insect control products (primarily malaria prevention) directly to BoP consumers. And all this thanks to a sweaty meeting held over a rake, a shovel and an open sewer. This was not business as usual but it was powerful!

The next step was to deepen our understanding of the BoP communities with which we were partnering with a homestay, literally living with our BoP partners. In reading the Protocol this task seems logical but slightly sophomoric. In implementing the protocol, however, the homestay proved to be a turning point in our understanding of and relationship with the community. I woke every morning with the sun to milk the family's cow or, to be honest, to try to milk the cow. (By the end of the weeklong homestay I was actually a semi-competent milker).

Also, putting ourselves in the humbling position of learning a non-business specific skill from our BoP counterparts was proof that we were there to listen, understand deeply and truly partner with them -- not to extract from them, force one-off solutions or provide philanthropy. The homestay was part of over a month of working to understand the needs and assets of the community with the community -- any insight we gained was also gained by the community. For instance, we noticed some composting was happening, but even more organic matter was being wasted. We worked with the community to identify this asset and develop ways to fully utilize the waste.

The Protocol pilot culminated with an Idea Generation Workshop that brought together community members, NGO partners and Joseph Njenga from SCJ Kenya to co-develop ideas for mutually valuable enterprises. The workshop started with identifying what everyone in the room, this new network of partners, considered to be a successful sustainable enterprise in this community. Once we had agreed upon a set of objectives and metrics, we went about identifying the skills and resources in the community and amongst the partners in the room. With that, each group set about generating and refining new business ideas to meet the mutual objectives with the resources available.

Several great ideas were generated but one in particular stood out and was adopted. SCJ is now helping young entrepreneurs from several youth groups in the slums start diversified homecare service businesses. The youth groups were already running garbage collection and sorting businesses but SCJ is now helping diversify and expand their offerings by developing their capacity and capability to offer the benefits of SCJ's homecare and insect control products. The business is creating employment and income for young entrepreneurs while bringing the benefits of SCJ's products to BoP homes that could not afford them off the shelf but can afford them as a service package.

Before leaving Kenya we had to ensure the viability and implementation of this new idea. We had to start "building the ecosystem," as the Protocol puts it, which meant solidifying the relationships between SCJ Kenya, the Taka Ni Pato groups and Carolina for Kibera so that these three partners could work together to develop this new mutually valuable enterprise.

From the start, working through the Protocol was not business as usual. We were generating deeper, more holistic relationships and very new insights into a potential SCJ consumer group by learning from them, living with them and partnering with them. We were seeking to co-create new business models and routes to market that met the requirements and challenges of business in the BoP. It was crucial that the BoP enterprises created not be charity from any partner's perspective. Rather, to be sustainable, the new initiative had to be valuable and profitable for everyone involved.

The new enterprise and business model is now being developed and piloted by SCJ Kenya in partnership with Carolina for Kibera and the most entrepreneurial of the Taka Ni Pato groups. It was fantastic to be a part of something new, something important and something of massive potential on so many levels and I thank SCJ and the BoP Learning Lab at Cornell for the opportunity. It is clear now to me that only by immersion and engagement with the BoP, by innovating new business models and by creating new routes to market, will we be able to use the power of large corporations and others to improve the lives of those at the Base of the Pyramid.

Justin DeKoszmovszky graduated from the MBA class of 2006 at the Cornell Johnson School of Management. This article is based on an SCJ Public Report where Justin recorded his experiences through the Kenya BoP Pilot Team.