[MUSIC] >> Welcome to Sustainable Innovation for Subsistence Marketplaces. I'm going to be talking about an introduction to the course and also about the first module on bottom-up immersion. >> Poverty and environmental issues are complicated. It may differ from one context to the other. For instance, poverty is influenced by the social, cultural and political factors that make low-income consumers behave differently in different markets. Similarly, environmental conditions and its associated challenges like climate change, desertification and deforestation change with geography. In order to make sense of such a complex situation, the best place to start is right at the root of the problem. This is what we call the bottom-up approach. As we shall see during this course, the bottom-up approach helps us understand the seemingly intractable problems of poverty and environmental sustainability more comprehensibly. To understand this approach better, let us visualize an iceberg. What we see of the iceberg at the top may be, but a small part of the entire mass of ice. So we capsize the iceberg and view it from the bottom, gradually moving to the top. This gives us a more complete and useful understanding of how large and magnificent the iceberg actually is. In this course, we will attempt to understand the markets of the poor or a subsistence marketplaces using the bottom-up approach. While doing so, we shall try to get a perspective from the field, examining the lives and life circumstances of subsistence, consumers and entrepreneurs. We shall also examine the environment, unraveling sustainability challenges and opportunities during this process. Finally, we will be using the bottom-up approach by starting with low-income segments in order to understand subsistence marketplaces. Then from there, we'll move up either to higher emerging market segments or higher-income develop market segments where we focus on environmental sustainability. Overall, we expect to gain a deep insight into subsistence marketplaces as sustainability issues for businesses using a bottom-up approach. So, unpacking the problem of poverty and the environment. >> Let me talk about what, how and why we are offering this course along with the subsequent course on sustainable business enterprises. Each course is self contained, but they fit together in some places as well. The what of these two courses is essentially to focus on poverty and the environment. These are huge global challenges that we face in the 21st century. So, we are going to focus on what we call subsistence marketplaces and on environmental sustainability. The how of the course is to take a bottom-up approach. You will understand what this means as well as how use activities and exercises to bring it out and why do we take this approach and focus on subsistence marketplaces and environmental sustainability, because these are large issues for businesses and because a bottom-up approach is ideally suited when we know less about a particular topic. So, what are we going to focus on? We're going to focus on poverty and the environment. Two huge global challenges and what they mean for business. These are two of the biggest challenges that we faced and we are going to be focusing on what this means for business. How are you going to go about doing this? We will take a bottom-up approach where we will start with the first course in this series of two courses, focusing on low income and then move on to higher-income segments. The first course has a project on subsistence marketplaces and is focused on poverty. The second course has a project on middle and upper-income emerging markets or advanced economies. I'm just focused environmental sustainability. We are bottom- up in a number of ways. We start with micro level understanding of life circumstances in order to develop products. Now consider three broad segments or three groups of customers around the world. Low-income customers, higher-income emerging market customers or advanced economy customers. This is an absolute over simplification, but we're doing this in order to illustrate a couple of things. The question that we have for you is how does understanding a low-income segment help in understanding higher-income segments in emerging markets and in advanced economies? Why do we focus on poverty and the environment? Because not only are these challenges large problems in the 21st century, but they're deeply intertwined in the way we do business and why do we take a bottom-up approach? Because this is a place to start when we don't know much. Poverty and the environment are both extremely challenging problems. Each context, each geography is different. We can't think about simply going from point A to point B. We have to act like we are in a jungle where we have to feel our way and try to understand what it means to go in different directions. Sometimes going down some paths and then coming back to the junction. Here are some questions for you to focus on. What is the logic of the overall four week course? What is the bottom-up approach? And why is it relevant for the topics covered? I want to explain the bottom-up approach by showing the illustration on the cover of my most recent book entitled Bottom-Up Enterprise. It shows an iceberg that is capsized or upside down. The idea here is that when you take a bottom-up approach, you see the entire iceberg. A related idea here is that when you capsize the iceberg, you create a momentum that comes from the energy from being bottom-up. So this is what we mean by the bottom-up approach and it is going to get more concrete, and more detailed as we go through the course. In the first module, we start with an introduction to the course, then we focus on subsistence marketplaces and how thinking, feeling and coping occur in these contexts. We move on to how to gain insights about marketplaces in these contexts. This is important as it helps to move the parallel project forward. Finally, we identify needs, drivers and context elements as we focus on a topic for the project. In terms of the parallel project, we focus on identifying the problem or the need. In the second module, we focus on bottom-up immersion and emersion. We begin with exchanges and relationships in subsistence marketplaces. We then focus on needs, products, relationships and markets in these contexts. We focus on environmental issues in subsistence marketplaces and then reflect back on the bottom-up immersion, and emersion process that takes us through the learning. In terms of the bottom-up project, we focus on understanding the problem and the opportunity. In the third module, we focus on the solution and bottom-up design. We start out by generating ideas and designing solutions. We think about evaluating solutions and designing ecosystems around the solutions. We focus on case studies and bottom-up design to take you through the design process. With the parallel project, the focus is on designing solutions. The fourth module is on Bottom-Up Enterprise. We focus on designing, communicating and delivering the value proposition of the enterprise. We analyze some cases relating to developing an enterprise plan. We summarize the course on sustainable innovation for subsistence marketplaces and we look back into what designing for subsistence marketplaces is all about. The project is about developing an enterprise plan. We go through a series of steps with respect to the project in the first four weeks. We identify the problem. Understand the problem and opportunity. Design the solution and develop the enterprise plan. So in a sense, we tried to understand the problem, design a solution around it and try to understand and figure out how to implement the solution. Even if you don't pursue a specific project as most of you perhaps won't be able to, you can follow along with what we are doing. Thank you. [SOUND]
