Product Description

With the end of the Cold War, the former Soviet Union and its allies, as well as China, India, and Latin America, opened their closed markets to foreign investment in a cascading fashion. Although this significant economic and social transformation has offered vast new growth opportunities for multinational corporations (MNCs), its promise has yet to be realized. The lackluster nature of most MNCs' emerging-market strategies over the past decade does not change the magnitude of the opportunity, which is in reality much larger than previously thought. The real source of market promise is not the wealthy few in the developing world, or even the emerging middle-income consumers: It is the billions of aspiring poor who are joining the market economy for the first time. This is a time for MNCs to look at globalization strategies through a new lens of inclusive capitalism. For companies with the resources and persistence to compete at the bottom of the world economic pyramid, the prospective rewards include growth, profits, and incalculable contributions to humankind. Countries that still don't have the modern infrastructure or products to meet basic human needs are an ideal testing ground for developing environmentally sustainable technologies and products for the entire world. Furthermore, MNC investment at "the bottom of the pyramid" means lifting billions of people out of poverty and desperation, averting the social decay, political chaos, terrorism, and environmental meltdown that is certain to continue if the gap between rich and poor countries continues to widen. Doing business with the world's 4 billion poorest people - two-thirds of the world's population - will require radical innovations in technology and business models. It will require MNCs to reevaluate price-performance relationships for products and services. It will demand a new level of capital efficiency and new ways of measuring financial success. Companies will be forced to transform their understanding of scale, from a "bigger is better" ideal to an ideal of highly distributed small-scale operations married to world-scale capabilities. In short, the poorest populations raise a prodigious new managerial challenge for the world's wealthiest companies: selling to the poor and helping them improve their lives by producing and distributing products and services in culturally sensitive, environmentally sustainable, and economically profitable ways.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #733853 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-01
• Released on: 2002-02-01
• Format: Download: PDF
• Binding: Digital
• 16 pages

About the Author
C.K. Prahalad is the Harvey C. Fruehauf Professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan Business School, Ann Arbor. He is also the founder and chairman of Praja Inc., a pioneer company in interactive event experiences, based in San Diego, Calif.

Stuart L.Hart is professor of strategic management, Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished Scholar, and codirector of the Center for Sustainable Enterprise at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan–Flagler Business School.

Customer Reviews

Don't buy this if you want the book, this is NOT THE BOOK
I also bought this thinking it was the book, Amazon needs to do a better job marking this so people will realize this is a short 16 page doc instead of the whole book.

Too bad, I would have loved to have gotten the whole book so easily.

The Fortune at the bottom of the Pyramid
This was a textbook, a reference book. This was not what I expected. Difficult to just read. I threw it away!

This is not the digital version of the book
I bought this assuming that this was a digital version of the book, but it is not so. Its a Booz-Allen-Hamilton's take on the central idea of the book. This digital version is 16 pages versus 496 pages of the original book.

I complained to Amazon, and they immediately refunded my purchase price. Two cheers to Amazon.