Research at the Base of the Pyramid
“Developing a New Perspective
Reuben Abraham is a consultant to the BOP Learning Lab at Cornell University, working towards setting up a BOP Learning Lab in India with a consortium of Indian partners. Reuben completed his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2005. For his doctoral research, he looked at whether privately provided mobile phone services, by virtue of their role as carriers of information, reduced the information asymmetries inherent in unorganized markets, making these markets more efficient and productive. During his time at Columbia, he was an Associate Fellow in Global Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Fellow at the Public Policy Consortium, and a Sloan Foundation Telecommunications Fellow.
He also founded the International Private Enterprise Group (IPEG) in 2005 (on the web at
www.ipegroup.net), an all-volunteer network of professionals, which promotes the role of the private sector, capital markets and technology in catalyzing economic development. IPEG currently has 100+ members in New York alone. Earlier, he was a strategic advisor to the RISC (Rural Infrastructure and Services Commons) project, promoted by Vinod Khosla and India’s leading Internet entrepreneur, Rajesh Jain. RISC/Deeshaa Ventures aimed to correct rural market inefficiencies by providing a shared infrastructure platform for user services in a commercially sustainable way by aggregating rural demand and coordinating infrastructure services. During the past six years, he has worked at three Columbia University research centers, including Jeff Sachs’ Earth Institute. In addition, he has also worked at the World Bank, investigating the impact of technology and privatization on economic development. Before coming to the U.S., Reuben was a two-time entrepreneur in India in the telecom/media space.
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Ravi Anupindi is the Michael R. and Mary Kay Hallman Fellow and an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Previously, he taught at the Stern School of Business, New York University and the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University. He teaches Operations Management (core) and an elective in Supply Chain Management for MBA. He also teaches in several executive education programs.
His main research areas include supply chain management, lean operations and marketing-operations interfaces. His more recent interest is in supply chain issues in the Bottom of the Pyramid economies.
For the past two years, he has been working with ITC Corp. in India on their e-choupal project resulting in 2 papers and an ongoing dissertation. He is the co-author of a textbook, Managing Business Process Flows (2nd Edition), Prentice Hall, 2006. His work has appeared in leading journals like Management Science, Operations Research, Journal of MSOM, Marketing Science, and IIE Transactions. His recent consulting experience and speaking engagements have been with Dell, Intel, Pall, Steelcase, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, and the USG Corporation. He is an associate editor for Journal of Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, Operations Research, Management Science, Naval Research Logistics, and IIE Transactions.
Professor Anupindi received a Ph.D. in Management of Manufacturing and Automation from Carnegie Mellon University in 1993, an M.E. in Automation from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, and a B.E. (Hons.) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India in 1982.
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James Austin holds the Snider Professorship of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He has been a member of the Harvard University faculty since 1972. His Doctor of Business Administration and MBA degree with Distinction are from Harvard University.
Professor Austin was the co-founder and chair of the School’s Social Enterprise Initiative. He has authored 16 books, dozens of articles, and over a hundred case studies on business and nonprofit organizations, including the prize winning book The Collaboration Challenge: How Nonprofits and Businesses Succeed Through Strategic Alliances. He also serves on the Executive Committee of Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
Dr. Austin has served as a Special White House Advisor on Food Policy, consultant to companies, governments, and nonprofit organizations, and speaker throughout the world and particularly in developing countries.
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Kevin Barham is a Research Associate of Ashridge Business School, UK with whom he has worked for over 25 years, latterly as Assistant Director of Research. This included several years based in France as a member of an interdisciplinary team of researchers, management developers and consultants working with multinational companies on international change projects.
His research interests encompass international and cross-cultural management, globalization and the development of international executives. His books include
The International Manager and
ABB: The Dancing Giant.
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Oana Branzei is Assistant Professor of Organizational Behaviour at York University’s Schulich School of Business and a Deputy Director of the Erivan K. Haub Program in Business and Sustainability. Dr. Branzei has a PhD in Business Administration from the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, and an MBA from the University of Nebraska. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Trade and International Relations from Al. I. Cuza University in Romania, and studied economic and entrepreneurial sciences at the Universidad de Valladolid Spain. At Schulich, Dr. Branzei teaches organizational behaviour and sustainable value creation in the MBA program, and research methods and structural equation modeling in the PhD Program. Her teaching has been recognized in 2005 with the 1st Place MBA/IMBA, 8th Annual Seymour Schulich Awards for Teaching Excellence. Dr. Branzei has worked as a business consultant and as a senior researcher with several academic and governmental organizations.
Her research interests focus on the origins of value creation, including the formation of strategies and relationships, network configurations, network dynamics and their effects on innovation and organizational learning, and external sources of competitive advantage.
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Michael Chu was appointed a Senior Lecturer in the Initiative on Social Enterprise of the General Management Group of the Harvard Business School in July 2003. He continues to serve as Senior Partner and a Founding Partner of Pegasus Capital, a firm dedicated to deploying equity capital in projects originating from Latin America. Mr. Chu teaches the second year elective courses Effective Leadership of Social Enterprise and Business Approaches Serving the Base of the Pyramid, the latter a new offering developed and taught together with Professor V. Kasturi Rangan. He is Faculty Co-Chair of the Executive Education program Strategic Leadership for Microfinance. In the past, he has taught the course Investing and Managing in Emerging Markets.
Before Pegasus, as President & CEO of ACCION International, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to microfinance, Mr. Chu worked to develop financial services for the working poor as a new segment of banking capable of outstanding returns. He participated in the founding of several microcredit financial institutions and regulated banks throughout Latin America, including Banco Solidario, one of the premier microlending institutions in the world, which under his chairmanship has been the most profitable bank in Bolivia.
From 1989 to 1993, as an executive and limited partner in the New York office of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co, Mr. Chu was one of sixteen professionals deploying KKR’s $5.7 billion private equity fund and managing an investment portfolio with aggregate annual revenues in excess of $60 billion. He joined the private equity firm from PACE Industries, a KKR-sponsored leveraged buyout, where he served as Senior Vice President & CFO. Previously, he held senior management positions in U.S. corporations and was a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. Mr. Chu currently serves on the boards of Sealed Air Corporation, ACCION International, BoardSource and is a Trustee of Dartmouth College. Chu graduated with an A.B.(Honors) from Dartmouth College and received a M.B.A. with highest distinction (Baker Scholar) from Harvard Business School.
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I am currently finishing my second year as an assistant professor of strategy at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I received my PhD in management from Texas A&M University in College Station in 2004, looking at strategic decision-making issues. I also received an MS in accounting from Trinity University, and a BS in finance from the University of Southern California. I have extensive experience traveling and living in BoP countries.
My long-term research focus most notably looks at the unprecedented human migration into urban slums, this seismic change in the size and scope of the world’s population into urban areas creates many challenges and opportunities. I want to facilitate entrepreneurs, MNCs and nonprofits, with a sustainability focus, in entering, creating and developing viable firms, strategic business units, subsidiaries, and joint ventures to serve the Base of the Pyramid market.
I also am looking at the changes that firms and nonprofits will need go through with regard to culture and deep assumptions, to design and structure issues due to the triple bottom line, innovative new business models, and novel organizational and governance mechanisms.
Lastly, I am attempting to understand why helping organizations exist.
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Gordon A. Enk is a Principal of Partners for Strategic Change, a consulting organization focused on facilitating a process effective strategic change by working in partnership with the management teams of client companies. The approach utilized by PSC