Videos:
Transcript:
It began to occur to us that, well wow... you know, I mean what's missing and what's really needed is how does the corporate sector begin to really think about the actual bottom of the income pyramid. You know, it's one thing to start at the top and then move incrementally down to the next you know, income level down, but that still leaves two thirds of humanity out of the picture. So how do we begin to think about, is there a role that the corporate sector, that the for-profit sector could play when it comes to the bottom of the pyramid? So we wrote a piece that ultimately ... it took us four years, nobody would touch it. It went through probably ten iterations, it became kind of an underground paper passed around on the net, companies started to get interested in it, you know, so both C. K. and I even since then have been fully occupied with this but nobody would publish it. Ultimately, it appeared in a new journal called Strategy in Business in January 2002, with the title 'The Fortune at the Bottom of Pyramid,' and that piece has had a major impact. So that you've seen now a number of conferences and a number of initiatives you know, corporations by the ... probably the 100s now have begun to adopt initiatives around this idea of the bottom of the pyramid.