While the global financial crisis arguably continues unabated it’s interesting to come across a story of a guy who’s acting on the idea of making a fortune from the bottom of the pyramid.
A Norwegian guy has based himself in Nairobi, and most notably designed a solar-powered cardboard boX cooker which can apparently be made for around 5 euros. There’s been a bit of hot air around the way it’s been publicised…namely it won an FT climate change competition and the write-up on FT stated that;
The $5 cooker uses the greenhouse effect to boil and bake.
Umm “greenhouse effect”?? How about solar energy, or as its more commonly known sunshine!!
However this spin appears to have a very clever rationale as;
The trials will generate data to back an application for carboncredits, the crucial element which will make the project scalable, he explains. He expects each stove to make a yearly profit of 20-30 euros, which will more than cover the manufacturing cost.
It’s a hell of an idea. He’s looking at getting millions of these out to villagers around Africa. At a cost price of around 5 euros each, plus what could be a fairly neglible distribution cost if he could for instance get NGO’s on board to do it for him, he could make a hell of a profit if he can claim 20-30 euros a year per unit for carbon credits based on them cutting down on the amount of wood being burnt for cooking, and therefore avoiding carbon dioxide emissions.
Not to mention the feel-good aspect of putting the naughty greenhouse effect to good use in alleviating the suffering of impoverished people…the promotional video he’s put out leaves no doubt as to its beneficial effects in that regard.
As he has said himself
“We’re going to make money on this. This is a whole new kind of business. I think Grameen [the celebrated microfinance institution which offers affordable credit to individuals and communities in Bangladesh] has proven that there’s an interesting business at the bottom of the pyramid.”
No kidding!! I wonder if the first world signatories to the Kyoto protocol had any idea that they would be funding this ‘whole new kind of business.’
As a side note these “kyoto boxes” are impressively simple and are what could be called a very old idea that has waited for the right combination of scientific/political theory and business acumen to make its debut …
The Kyoto Box is a combination of de Sausseurs “hot box” from 1767 and modern manufacturing (cardboard, from ca. 1880!). However, the production version is made from recycled polypropylene and will last much longer. PP only consists of carbon and hydrogen and is completely benign.
It’s amazing what the right idea at the right time can do … Shai Agassi has come up with a way to circumvent the problem that has plagued electric cars for over a century…namely the length of time it takes to charge the batteries. His solution is to focus on a business model that makes money not from the cars, but from the electric miles. Companies such as his Better Place own the batteries and are responsible for keeping them charged etc… a business model based on that of the cellphone and airtime minutes. It’s likely that he isn’t the first person to come up with the idea, but it’s certainly the right time to deliver it.
The speed has been phenomenal…
By early summer 2008, Agassi had two countries ready to roll out the plan, a major automaker producing the cars, and $200 million in committed capital. He had launched the fifth-largest startup of all time in less than a year.
After a career spent thinking exclusively about business software, Agassi now thrills to the idea that he’s changing the world. “I get to shift multiple markets,” he says. “I get to shift economies. It’s extremely liberating. I breathe differently.”
He’s very savvy politically..he has already persuaded the Israeli government to restructure their tax system to encourage the uptake of the cars and is working on political levers in other countries and states to achieve the same effect.
He’s already inked deals with the State of Hawaii, Israel, Australia, the San Francisco Bay area, Denmark and is working with Japan.
I’ve been saying for some time that China is going to be in big trouble…I think that with these stats not much more needs to be said….
The official Xinhua News Agency reported this week that 3,631 toy exporters — 52.7 percent of the industry’s enterprises — went out of business in 2008. Factory closure in China a sign of global woes, CNN, October 2008
It’s also fascinating to watch how the world is getting increasingly angry at the US for the crisis .. without taking responsibility for their own complicity … economic responsibility has been absent for quite some time around most of the globe, not just the US and the repercussions for that kind of behaviour are always going to come home to roost at some point… it’s somewhat disingenuous to blame the country that falls first
…the assembly line worker was also furious at the United States.
“This financial crisis in America is going to kill us. It’s already taking food out of our mouths,” the 42-year-old laborer said Friday as he stood outside the shuttered Smart Union Group (Holdings) Ltd. factory in the southern city of Dongguan.
I think Google could be a big winner from Obama’s election to the US Presidency. He unveiled his innovation agenda at Google in November 2007. In his victory speech he specifically said that “the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest in our lifetime…there’s energy to harness …”
Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google specifically endorsed Barack because of his support for net neutrality and his decision to use the internet from the outset of his campaign showing that Obama will be a tech friendly president. Obama sat down with Schmidt among others when he swung through the Sunshine State in October for what he called an economic summit at Palm Beach Community College to call for a power grid overhaul.
“As Obama explained, the tangle of electrical lines connecting power plants to homes and businesses across this country is leaking like a bad plumbing system. The Google chief wanted to make sure all the talk of infrastructure spending included some attention to this problem. And being the wizard of the Internet, he talked up some space-age concepts, like being able to capture electricity generated by the brakes on advanced, hybrid cars and sell it back to the electric companies. It’s quite a concept, but he’s leapfrogging over Obama’s simpler call for more fuel efficiency and more solar panels. Still, it was Schmidt’s star turn on the political stage and he was making the most of it.“
Google has huge plans for the energy sector and according to Daniel M. Kammen, a professor in the energy and resources group at the University of California, Berkeley, and an adviser on energy to the Obama campaign. “Google is in the lead in terms of human resources as well as money.”
In addition a Google backed plan to open up unused television airwaves called white spaces to be accessed by unlicensed devices for free wireless internet has beaten off powerful lobby interests and won. Google co-founderLarry Page has likened the white spaces to “Wi-Fi on steroids.”
This development could open up the web in a massive way across the US in ways the rest of the world can only dream about at the moment as they “say the plan would expand Americans’ Internet access, especially in rural areas. White- space devices will tap into free, wireless Web access.” Free wireless web access while rockclimbing in the backcountry … count me in!!
Google is known for stealth. The search engine company kept its advertising ambitions under wraps for years, a strategy that helped it become the dominant tech company in Silicon Valley.
Watch this space … Google is going to play a very powerful role in the Obama administration.
From Al Jazeera …. Brown is in Saudi Arabia begging for money for the IMF, and along the way for Britain which is heading into a serious ‘recession’ (read depression). He’s trying to play tough with words like;
“As long as they play by our rules and operate in a commercial manner, we welcome investment from sovereign wealth funds in the UK.”
I’m guessing the reality is that he needs the money real bad, and he doesn’t really care how the funds are applied….or at least he won’t in the near future. The photograph of him below is hilarious … he has his knees primly together like a well trained schoolgirl, while the sheik is hangin’ out casually like a hood rat.
There seems to be a wave of whiny socialism sweeping the planet at the moment with everyone holding out their hands and saying ‘gimme gimme’ … with a radically increasing number of countries asking the IMF to bail them out and Brown saying things like;
“Brown met Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah on Saturday and is leading attempts to boost the IMF’s financial reserves.
Referring to Gulf countries, he said: “The oil producing countries, who have generated over $1 trillion from higher oil prices in recent years, are in a position to contribute.”
Apparently the IMF has $250 billion available … I wonder how long that’s going to last for the global economy, when the US has poured well over a $trillion into their economy in recent months to little effect.
On that note, Wired magazine also has a nice consolidation of info about the The X Prize Ecosystem
Tata Motors the crew behind the worlds cheapest car have also entered the race. There are a number of really cool paradigm busting car companies starting to emerge that are focused on low energy use…often electricity. None seem to have really got past the problem of what we currently consider a reasonable speed for a good length of time without having to recharge for quite some time … but they are (hopefully) a cool beginning. Think from Norway, Dynasty with Low Speed Electric Vehicles in Canada, Buddy also from Norway, Aptera in California and Tesla with a super fast but also expensive (think US$100,000) electric sports car also in California. They’re getting some great attention gettin the Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at the announcement of their new car for 2008. (One of the Paypalfounders (Paypal Mafia) are behind this outfit). [A quick synopsis of Paypal present and future here].
On the topic of cool sports cars, Rinspeed have an amazing vehicle that is a James Bond inspired, zero-emissions, electric aqua-car that “moves like a fish in water” to depths of up to 33 feet (10 meters) and still manages to reach speeds of around 75mph (120kmh) when on terra firma. Then there is the stunning hydrogen powered sportscar called Scorpion from Texas based outfit Ronn Motor Company.
Financial literacy is finally on the radar in NZ. The Retirement Commission has announced they have received more than $400,000 from the country’s banks to help fund a trial programme in 10 schools. Pupils would learn how to manage their finances, about hire purchase contracts, interest rates, the ramifications of bad credit ratings, and the importance of financial planning and saving.Not quite sure why the Retirement Commission but hey! It’s a start. Perhaps not unrelated are the problems regarding the high levels of youth leaving school early especially among Maori and Pacific Islanders.
The Retirement Commission’s 2006 report for the OECD is interesting reading. The Economic Survey of NZ 2007 by the OECD goes on to encourage NZ to improve its financial literacy and notes that the NZ government “plans to integrate financial literacy into the NZ curriculum by 2009″ and that further “efforts in this direction should be pursued”.
A 2007 article on the importance of financial literacy to the overall economy by NZ’s Reserve Bank can be found here. Various useful resources and links can be found on the nzliteracyportal.org.nz page.
One guy has written that “today’s society lacks financial literacy and business educators should team up with teachers to do something about it”. The same guy has written an interesting blog on NZ’s internet and its comparison with Finland.
The Ashden Awards are kind of the Green Oscars for renewable energy. They have some cool stuff on their website like resources for primary schools to explore sustainable energy sources based on companies/organisations around the world that are actually making it happen. (I don’t agree with their conclusions regarding human-caused global warming however). I really like the 2006 winnersGrameen Shakti who have now installed a total of 150,000 solar home systems in Bangladesh and have supported some of their technicians (mostly women) to become independent entrepreneurs.
They do this through a Grameen Technology Center program where they train women on renewable energy technologies and help them to set up their own businesses. These women have set up their own businesses at home and at market places assembling and marketing solar accessories.
Selco India summarises nicely what is required to make ‘green’ energy systems work … make ‘em real easy to use basically. “(We) must provide not only needed energy solar systems to customers, but also the necessary customer information, installation, training, financing, and other products and services in order to develop a sustainable sales and service infrastructure.”
What we need are “Green Energy McDonalds” franchises … strong systems that are very easy to teach and to implement, and are transportable to any cultural context.
A guy called CK Prahalad has written a very cool book called The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits Botttom of the pyramid refers to the 4 billion people who live on less than $2 per day. Prahalad points out that these people have huge potential, both for themselves and also for private businesses. A reasonably good summary can be found here. He argues that it is not enough to simply apply traditional products to this grouping, rather new technologies are needed.
From the back cover: The world’s most exciting, fastest-growing new market? It’s where you least expect it: at the bottom of the pyramid. Collectively, the world’s billions of poor people have immense entrepreneurial capabilities and buying power. You can learn how to serve them and help millions of the world’s poorest people escape poverty.
An example of this are the telecommunications companies that thrived in Somalia as far back as 2004 without any form of central government, providing the “cheapest web access in Africa“. This is alive and well today despite the country continuing to be a ‘failed state’ following the invasion of the country at the beginning of the year by US-backed Ethiopia (to drive out the Muslim Sharia-court government which had formed after years of chaos). Cell-phones are now being used in innovative ways by poor people in Africa such as transfering money.
Some companies have already made great money out of the poor people of the world by the age old fundamental of bringing them what they need at a price they can afford.
Then there is Visionspring a global social enterprise which trains low-income men and women as “Vision Entrepreneurs” to start microfranchises that conduct vision screenings within local communities, sell affordable reading glasses, and refer those who require advanced eye care to reputable clinics.
The World Bank estimates that there is a $17 billion African market in off-grid lighting.
A company has tried to address this in India with solar lighting systems aimed at people surviving on less than $4 a day.
The Enterprise Culture and Skills Activities (ECSA) Fund is designed to support the development of a culture of enterprise and business success in New Zealand.
It is an annual contestable fund for projects that aim to develop enterprising skills and attitudes among New Zealanders. This includes seed funding and piloting new and innovative approaches. Young people are a specific target of this fund. [my highlights]
There is 1.5 million bucks up for grabs each year. Not all of it was claimed last year (2007) due to a “significant number of the project applications received fell short of being able to deliver a cross curricula enterprise approach. A cross curricula approach is defined as teachers embedding enterprise in more than one curricular area, incorporating authentic learning by involving business and the community.”
One group that won some funding from this fund last year sounds really interesting. [Te Kaihau Ltd] They are developing a programme linking up Vic uni 3rd year Marketing and International Business students with students from universities overseas, to link export-ready industry clients to markets here and in the partner country/s.
They also have a ‘Da Vincis’ project aiming to extract some of the potential from ADHD kids. Apparently ADHD kids are 4 times as likely to become entrepreneurs. Their characteristics are also a ‘mirror image of the behaviour characteristics common to most successful entrepreneurs, artists and actors, and probably 100% of all comedians”. Part of this programme teams up with an NZ company selling meditation online to the world, which has also been trialled with great success in decile 1-10 NZ schools. “Teachers claim bullying has virtually disappeared and student learning has significantly improved”.
They also have the Global Enterprise Experience project. This contest links four pairs of participants from diverse countries to develop a business concept proposal. Teams communicate via the web.
The participants have 3 weeks to develop a business concept proposal on a profitable product or service that meets the needs of the poor. It ran in 2008 with 465 participants from 32 countries.
Posted by metahound 
Posted by metahound 
Posted by metahound 
On the 
