[SOUND] [MUSIC] We started off by pointing out how different we are in terms of our approach. We take a bottom-up approach rather than a macro level approach. We start with people, their life circumstances, how they engage in the marketplace as consumers and entrepreneurs, and we build up from there. That's why we try to understand the one on one interactions and the thinking and the feeling and the coping and so on, as well as issues like the local environment. So that is something to keep in mind. We talked about how people think, feel, and cope in the marketplace. Fundamentally the way people think is different in terms of their concrete thinking and their pictographic thinking. If you want to understand people living in subsistence and then design solutions for them, we have to unlearn some of the ways we think and try to understand how people think and react in a particular situation. In terms of feeling we talked about how people tried to maintain their self esteem in seemingly mundane situations, like being at the counter at the store. It may not be a big deal to me, it is a big deal to them because their literacy is involved. And their illiteracy is often the cause for their lack of income and their poverty as well. We talked about how people cope, sometimes in ingenious ways, to get around these extreme constraints that have faced all their lives. So, it's very important to start out at that micro level of understanding how people think, how they feel, and how they cope, in order to design solutions for people living in subsistence marketplaces. We then moved on to understand how these marketplaces work in terms of the exchanges, in terms of the relational environment, and the larger context. In terms of exchanges, there's a constant demand for customization. Everybody wants a special deal. And how that is managed is critical for the entrepreneur. If you give a special deal you need have some logic, some rational for it. Sometimes you cannot give a special deal, because everybody will come and ask you the same thing. Transactions are very fluid. People will not pay for installments if the product is not good and so on. And buyers and sellers are often quite responsive in this one-on-one interactional environment. In terms of how people relate to each other, relationships mean a lot. That's how people multiply their value to the seller or to the buyer. And all of this is happening in the human context of survival, so you can't separate the economic from the human. So that's why we talk about interactional empathy. And finally all of this is happening with oral language it's happening with people talking to each other and it's happening with people who are interdependent on each other. We talked about how at the need products level, it's really about betterment of life circumstances. And that means we have to understand life circumstances and think about how we can better them. At the relationship level it's about emphasizing the human dimension, which means things like friendliness and trust. And in those you'll learn community welfare become very important. And at the level of markets, it's about this complex social value that is blurred with the market places, and it's about negotiating the social value. So working with very different groups and using social good as a common denominator become very important. We talked about how we can gain marketplace insights in these settings in terms of how people think, how they feel, and how to conduct research in these settings. We talked about environmental issues and subsistence and the irony in that in resource-rich settings people could do something about their environment, but often feel indifferent about it. Whereas in subsistence settings people live their environment, they suffer the consequences, but they simply have very little control about what they can do about it. We talked about what people try to sustain in terms of survival, relatedness, and growth. People tried to survive in terms of basic needs, they tried to relate to each other as well as the natural environment, and they tried to grow by aspiring for a better future for their through education and other means. In order to understand subsistence market places and design solutions, we have to think first of all about the need, what the drivers of the need are, and what the larger context is in terms of its various elements. This is because designing a solution in this context requires deep understanding. We are fundamentally unfamiliar with subsistence context, and we can't take a bunch of things for granted and just focus on the need and the product. We have to understand the drivers and the larger context as well. In putting together a solution that is the core and the augmented solution, the augmented solution may just be education. To educate about the need, to educate about the need for the product and so on. And then there is the need for an ecosystem because of deprivation being on multiple fronts. Maybe it's a network of farmers or a network of women entrepreneurs and so on, but the ecosystem is important as well in order to support the solution. And finally, there's a need for a business plan that addresses a lot of different elements in terms of the value proposition, how it's communicated and how it's developed, and so on. What did we learn about designing solutions? Well first of all we learned that you have to understand the life circumstances around that need. You have to understand not just the customer, but the community and the larger context. You're dealing in an unfamiliar setting, and you're dealing in a setting where the need gets blurred with life circumstances, and with community level issues as well. So we talked about the project in terms of the problem, which is about the need, the drivers, and the context, the opportunity in terms of the geography, the beneficiary or customer, and the usage situation. And the solution, core, augmented, the ecosystem and how it is better than the alternatives. We talked about the enterprise plan in terms of the value proposition, communicating it and delivering it, and the sustainable outcomes in terms of the social, the environmental, and the economic. We talked about a process for developing solutions, which include virtual immersion, emersion, which is a compare and contrast in terms of the concepts you already know and the new concepts you need. In terms of actual immersion, which you've been doing through the weeks of the course, and in terms of idea generation and concept generation and testing as well. In terms of designing solutions, we talked about understanding subsistence market places including life circumstances and envisioning needs. We talked about identifying critical product needs, both basic and aspirational. We talked about designing products for harsh usage, for low literate users, to be locally sustainable, to serve multiple purposes, and to be customizable. And we talked about product development in terms of leveraging existing infrastructure, adding on to existing products, and developing product relevant infrastructure. We talked about business level processes in terms of products being blurred with betterment of life circumstances, relationships being blurred with the human dimension, and markets being blurred with a social milieu, and therefore, how doing good as it relates to your product offering is critical in order to do well. So, when we think about the business case, we think of it in three stages. We think about moving from sympathy to informed empathy, through exercises like virtual emotion. We then move to Stage two, which involves using understanding to design solutions for subsistence marketplaces. And finally, we move to Stage three perhaps, which is designing solutions for advanced economies from subsistence marketplaces. For example, if you have a tele-medicine solution that works in rural settings and subsistence marketplaces, there is a tremendous need for these kinds of solutions to provide health care in advanced economies as well. The social enterprise case, again, moving from sympathy to informed empathy in stage one. In stage two, using understanding to help people in subsistence marketplaces. And in stage three realizing that you are most enriched in the process. Indeed, you do these things because you think you can help somebody else, but in the end, you enrich yourself in the process. Let me conclude by showing some images, one of which you have seen before, where women are gathering wood for cooking. Now, as I live in an advanced economy and look at this image, I think that it's happening now, but it's happening far away to others are not like us, and it's probably not going to happen to us. Here is a picture that seems a little bit closer. Now I think it's happening in the future, with a question mark. It's happening somewhat far away, but being in North America it seems a little closer. It's happening to others somewhat like us, and I'm not sure how likely it is that it'll happen to us. This is a picture of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. This is a picture after a gulf oil spill. And now I think that it is happening now, it's happening closer to home, it's happening to others like us, and I'm quite certain that it happened. So this leads to the ultimate conundrum. In subsistence marketplaces people live the environment. Despite low literacy and low income, they have to envision the medium term to survive. In advanced marketplaces, a number of these problems seem to be far away. Yet we have the ability and the resources to envision the longer term and try to find solutions. What we find is that in subsistence marketplaces people are unable. They don't have the literacy, they don't have the resources, but they are willing. So the woman you met earlier is willing to think about the medium term in order to conserve the environment. In advanced marketplaces, the question we have to ask ourselves is, we are able, but are we willing to confront some of these challenges? Can we bridge these distances in order to create innovations that help subsistence marketplaces and help us as well? [BLANK_AUDIO]
