Centers of Sustainable Co-created Products by Bop: Development Inspired by Social Entrepreneurs

This paper frames the main components required to setup Product Co-Creation Centers (PC 3) within (rural or urban) BoP environments as a method to (1) identify creative and entrepreneur individuals; (2) aid the process of generating new ideas; (3) support the co-creation of products and services as well as their related business models for BoP needs, and (4) carry out market and social impact analysis to determine new development policies. This paper describes an analysis of secondary information sources, which provided the components of our integrative approach to frame the co-creation of sustainable products as a means to boost social entrepreneurship. The paper also describes coming research efforts to make our approach operational. To overcome potential risks along the operationalization of the method, we propose analyzing case studies that enlighten the processes and conditions to successfully implement PC 3. The general characteristics of our first showcase in a BoP community in Mexico are also explained. We expect that the approach presented in this paper will turn out into a novel philosophy opening up a broad multidisciplinary field of research. 1. INTRODUCTION Design for the base-of-the-pyramid (BoP) is a term referring to the creation of products and services targeting the needs and affordances of people living on less than $2 a day. Since Prahalad and Hart (2002) raised the awareness of Multinational-Corporations (MNC) on the existence of a very large pool of unattended customers among the world " s poorest, design for BoP has become a well-known approach for boasting development in poor urban and rural areas. In fact, they stated that around 90% of designers create products for the richest 10% of the world population. Based on such statistics, Paul Polak in his book " Out of Poverty " (Polak 2008) declares that BoP should therefore be seen as a market where cheap products can be sold in large volumes to generate value and improve live standards.