Impact of Base-of-the-Pyramid Ventures

Event Details

Time: November 16, 2009 at 9pm to November 18, 2009 at 4pm
Location: Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, The Netherlands
Street: Landbergstraat 15
City/Town: Delft, The Netherlands
Website or Map: http://bopimpact.nl
Phone: +31.15. 2783034
Event Type: conference
Organized By: Ilona de Jongh and more
Latest Activity: Apr 2

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Event Description

Today, there is little dispute that poverty is one of the most pressing global problems calling for innovative solutions and market-based approaches. The so-called Base of the Pyramid strategy (BoP) –Ref. 1– is a novel approach involving the private sector to help alleviate poverty by serving these markets in ways responsive to their needs by providing access to knowledge and technology in an economically profitable way. In this process a balance between social-, ecological-, and economic sustainability needs to be strived for (People-Planet-Profit). A number of BoP initiatives have been undertaken during the past years, often with impact claimed on the lives of those at BoP – local producers, sellers and buyers as well as the community –Ref. 2–. But have these ventures really achieved the sustainability impact initially envisioned and reach the poor –Ref. 3– on a large scale effectively? The main question this Conference is addressing is:

How to define, measure, and optimize towards enduring value creation of BoP ventures?

The purpose of this conference is to increase BoP knowledge on value creation and impact assessments by bringing together keynote speakers and delegates from business, academia, NGOs and the public sector. The conference will provide a platform to share conceptual and empirical evidences that address ways to better understand and increase the sustainability impacts of BoP ventures in terms of changes in economic, capacity, environmental and relational well-being. We invite you to share your theoretical and empirical knowledge on the conference topics, being:
Impact Assessment & Optimization of value creation.

IMPORTANT DATES
Articles from practitioners as well as scientific articles and posters on the conference theme, with theoretical as well as empirical contributions are welcome. Contributors are encouraged to submit an initial expression of interest in the form of an abstract of approximately 300 words or a brief poster proposal. Email this to BoP-IO@tudelft.nl. The deadline for submission of abstracts is May 15, 2009. Submitters will receive the confirmation of selection of abstracts before June 01, 2009

Selected best 6 papers will be published in a special issue of Sustainable Development, Publisher: Wiley InterScience. This is planned to be published in 2010.

Please check our website for more details!
www.bopimpact.nl
E-mail: BoP-IO@tudelft.nl

1. C.K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Strategy+Business 26 (2002): 1-15.
2. Ted London, Making Better Investments at the Base of the Pyramid, Harvard Business Review, to be published in May 2009.
3. Erik Simanis, Stuart Hart and colleagues, The Base of the Pyramid Protocol: Toward Next Generation BoP Strategy, Cornell Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise, Ithaca, NY, 2008.