Building on the pioneering work of Professor C.K. Prahalad of the University of Michigan, Christopher and his colleagues seek to study how services can be developed for and marketed to the bottom two-thirds of the world’s population, who have an annual per capita income of less (often much less) than US$2,000. The first step is to look at the services that already exist and see what lessons—managerial, economic, social, and cultural—can be learned.

Conference participants were fascinated as Christopher described four preliminary case studies currently in progress:

In Bolivia, PRODEM has developed a low-cost approach to providing small loans (microfinance) to poor Bolivian farmers, using off-line electronic delivery systems designed to be user-friendly for both illiterate and semi-literate people

In Mexico, Banco Azteca is the nation’s newest bank, founded in 2002 to cater to the 16 million households with incomes of US $250-1300 per month (jointly, they have with a combined annual income of US$120 billion). Existing banks consider such small accounts to be “a nuisance.” Banco Azteca’s outlets are located in hundreds of Elecktra appliance stores, owned by the bank’s holding company. Christopher initiated this case study with a visit to a branch in Puerto Vallarta.

In Bangladesh, Grameen Telecom’s Village Phone concept involves making a micro-loan to a village woman of high status and with a prior credit history. This loan enables her to buy a mobile phone, purchase minutes at wholesale rates, and sell calls to villagers, whom she times with a stopwatch and charges at retail. Here the marketing unit of analysis becomes an entire village. The average monthly revenue per community is $120, somewhat more than a typical American pays in monthly cellphone charges.

In India, Nutan Tiffin Box Suppliers Association (NTBSA) of Mumbai (Bombay), has been in operation since the 1890s. It is famous for its 5000 dubbawallahs who, organized into cooperative teams of 30, daily pick up 175,000 hot meal containers from wives and mothers in suburban communities and deliver these to their menfolk working in the city, returning the empty containers at the end of the day. Despite a low-tech delivery system (riding into the city on suburban trains, sorting the containers by hand on a paved area outside the station, and walking to their final destinations carrying trays of lunchboxes on their heads), and the need to aggregate and sort boxes twice, they achieve a better than Six-Sigma record on delivery, amounting to one lost box in six million transactions! Christopher described how he had studied the dubbawallahs in action on a recent visit to Mumbai and discussed with Indian managers and academics the transferability of the concept to other cities and other product categories.

Fellow researchers now actively involved in this project include Professors Jochen Wirtz of the National University of Singapore and Javier Reynoso of Tec de Monterrey in Mexico. Others will be added from different countries.

Phase I, which is already underway, comprises a literature review and development of case studies in several emerging economies on different continents. Some of these case studies will be originated by the members of the research team, others will build on and expand the prior work of other researchers.