Three of the top scholars on the Base of the Pyramid topic will discuss how the field has evolved in the 10 years since the idea was first articulated. The talk, part of the WDI Global Impact Speaker Series, is at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 1 in Blau Auditorium at the Ross School of Business.
Stuart Hart, Ted London, and C.K. Prahalad also will give their views on what has been learned so far, the challenges ahead, and the future opportunities.
Hart, the Samuel C. Johnson Chair of Sustainable Global Enterprise and Professor of Management at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management, and Prahalad, the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Strategy, wrote the groundbreaking 2002 Harvard Business Review article, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” which provided the first articulation of how business could profitably serve the needs of the four billion poor in the developing world. Both men serve as fellows at WDI, and Hart also runs the
Institute’s Green Leap Initiative.
Prahalad's book, "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits," was named the best business book of 2004 by Amazon.com and Fast Company.
London, director of
WDI’s BoP research initiative, has positioned the Institute as a global leader in exploring the intersection of business strategy and poverty alleviation.
On Thursday, London will talk about building better businesses for the BoP. Hart will talk about the need to bring green thinking to the BoP. And Prahalad will discuss the innovation opportunities at the BoP.
Here are three short biographies of the speakers.
Before joining Cornell in 2003, Hart was the Hans Zulliger Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Enterprise and Professor of Strategic Management at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, where he founded the Center for Sustainable Enterprise and the Base of the Pyramid Learning Laboratory. Previously, he taught corporate strategy at the University of Michigan Business School and was the founding director of the Corporate Environmental Management Program (CEMP). Professor Hart is one of the world’s top authorities on the implications of sustainable development and environmentalism for business strategy. He has published over 60 papers and authored or edited six books. His article “Beyond Greening: Strategies for a Sustainable World” won the McKinsey Award for Best Article in the Harvard Business Review for 1997 and helped launch the movement for corporate sustainability. With C.K. Prahalad, Hart also wrote the path-breaking 2002 article “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” which provided the first articulation of how business could profitably serve the needs of the four billion poor in the developing world. His new book, Capitalism at the Crossroads, was published by Wharton School Publishing in 2005. The second edition of the book with a new Foreword by Al Gore was published in 2007.
London, a leading expert on the intersection of business strategy and poverty alleviation, is a Senior Research Fellow at the William Davidson Institute (WDI) and on the faculty at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. At WDI, he directs the Base of the Pyramid Initiative, a program that champions innovative ways of thinking about more inclusive forms of capitalism. Professor London’s research centers on designing enterprise strategies and poverty alleviation approaches for low-income markets, assessing poverty reduction outcomes of business ventures, and developing capabilities for cross-sector collaborations. He has published numerous articles, reports, and teaching cases, sits on several advisory boards, and shares his research in venues across the globe. Professor London has also served as a management advisor and educator for a variety of companies, non-profit organizations, and development agencies exploring the role and impact of market-based strategies on poverty alleviation.
Prahalad is more than an academic; he is one of the foremost business thinkers of our time. He was elected as the most influential living management thinker by Thinkers 50, The Times of London and Suntop Media. He has written five seminal books on strategy. His 1987 coauthored (with Yves Doz) book: The Multinational Mission, Free Press, set the framework for understanding global business. He wrote, with Gary Hamel: Competing for the Future, Harvard Business School Press, 1994 which was hailed as the best business book of the year. He coauthored (with Venkat Ramaswamy) The Future of Competition, Harvard Business School Press (2004). Business Week described it as a book “full of disruptive ideas”. Business week and Strategy + Business voted it as one of the best business books of the year. His 2004 book, “The Fortune At The Bottom Of The Pyramid” Wharton Business Publishing, was voted the top business book of 2004 by The Economist, Fast Company and Amazon.com editors. As the book suggests, Dr. Prahalad points out that the corporate sector can help the poor – profitably. He coauthored (with M.S. Krishnan) The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value through Global Networks, McGraw Hill (2008). He has won the McKinsey prize four times for the best article in Harvard Business Review. He received honorary doctorates in Economics (University of London) and Engineering (Stevens Institute of Technology), Business (Tilberg, The Netherlands and Abertay, Scotland). He was a member of the UN Blue Ribbon Commission on Private Sector and Development.