May 27, 2009
Reverse Polination, Lessons from the Developing World
My name is Alex Nosnik and I am interning with Enterprise For a Sustainable World (ESW)in their Base of the Pyramid (BoP) project in Flint, MI, which is called SUN Enterprises. Although I am sure it will be a challenging experience, I have been impressed and excited by the work thus far. Much of the first weeks have been spent getting caught up on the general structure and format of a BoP project. I have been able to engage in many aspects of the project and have had ample opportunity to begin meeting the local entrepreneurs or Business Partners (BPs).
The operation is structured into three tiers: the corporate partner (which in this case is the largest non profit health care firm in the US, Ascension Health), the facilitation team lead by ESW, and the local entrepreneurs. After having a few weeks to observe and assess the general dynamics in the group, there appears to be several ways that the traditional BoP Protocol is acutely hindered in the setting of Developed World poverty.
First, poverty in the US is much more heterogeneous than poverty in the developing world. There is a large variation surrounding issues of socio-economic status, education level, technological sophistication, professional savvy, and overall cultural literacy. Although I only have an anecdotal understanding of the BoP projects in the developing world, it seems that those projects interact with a rather homogeneous population, in terms of ethnicity, education, technological savvy, etc. This, in combination with the language barrier, perhaps allows the advisory team to more directly lead the the developing world projects. It seems apparent that this first developing world project in Flint is almost paralyzed by the need to seek consensus from the entire team.
The project is experiencing problems in communication and facilitating follow through with many core tasks and milestones. Overall, there appear to be many structural problems that are hindering the project's ability to move forward smoothly and effectively. This is not to say that the project is not making progress; rather, it seems that there are some substantive ways that this progress can be expedited more smoothly by instituting better leadership, both internally by the BPs and externally by the facilitation team, in addition to a better management structure.
I was also tasked with a project surrounding the research technique called RAP (Rapid Assessment Process), developed (I think) by a career USAID civil servant named James Beebe. It is a very interesting hybrid of traditional ethnographic research and a more rapid-fire marketing engagement of customer preferences and managerial assessment of internal organizational and inter-personal problems. I was asked to investigate ways in which it could be incorporated into SUN.
The week ahead will most likely be focused on generating a curriculum and the collateral materials necessary to begin implementing RAP.
Posted by anosnik at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)