试看：V. Kasturi Rangan: Business at the Base of the Pyramid
Base of the Pyramid Defined
My name is Kash Rangan and this session is about business at the base of the pyramid. Let me give you a little bit of the background of where we are at, and then I’ll dive into the matter itself. My colleague, Michael Chu and I teach this course in the MBA program. Michael Chu comes from the same world that Chris comes from, the microfinance world. Let me give you a little bit of a background as to why we do it. First of all, there's a typo which I just recognized, which is that the world is about 6.5 billion people, not 42.5 billion people. It's not growing exponentially that fast. But the whole idea is that most of what we do in any business school, including the Harvard Business School, really pertains to the top 2.5 billion people, in the sense that these are the markets of developed economies. It might be Western Europe, in North America, or even in the emerging countries. It’s the top three or four cities and it’s aimed at the top 2.5 billion consumers of the world. And that's most of what business focuses on because capitalists rule work, free markets rule work, and all those things, the good things we learn here, work there.
What the business at the base of the pyramid is about is the markets that exist for the bottom four billion people. There are four billion people, who operate in markets that do not look like the markets at the top of the pyramid so we call it base of the pyramid rather than calling it purely bottom of the pyramid. And why is this important? Why should we in the Harvard Business School care about these four billion people? We should care simply for our own economic reasons. The top of the pyramid was about 80 percent of the GDP of the world about two decades ago, 80/20. The world’s GDP is about 35 trillion dollars, 80 percent came from the top, 20 percent from the bottom.
Today it’s about 65/35 because India and China have been growing at 8 to 9 percent a year. The top of the pyramid is growing at 2 to 3 percent a year. By 2030, it’s going to be 50/50. By 2030, if you aggregate the world GDP, 50 percent of it will come from those countries and emerging countries which are at the bottom. So it’s important for us just economically because these are the markets where we make products, and where we sell products. These are the markets that are growing at 8, 9, and 10 percent. Our market is growing 2 to 3 percent. It is important for businesses to participate and understand what's going on here. And these markets don’t look like the markets which are at the top of the pyramid. That’s why Michael and I created this course.


Letting No Serious Crisis Go to Waste: Innovation and Entrepreneurship After the Great Recession
Professor Bhaskar Chakravorti
Introduction
Lecture Text
Letting No Serious Crisis Go to Waste: Innovation and Entrepreneurship After the Great Recession
Professor Bhaskar Chakravorti
(Edited for clarity)
PROFESSOR CHAKRAVORTI: My name is Bhaskar Chakravorti, which is a mouthful, and I would love to learn more about all the interesting work that all of you have been doing in your time at HBS. But welcome, I believe we have a great program here for you. So before we go into stuff that’s up there, this whole notion of the economic downturn being a great opportunity for us as individuals, for us as companies, for countries, how many of you believe this? Ah, quite a few hands.
For those of you who put up their hands, and even those who didn’t, in your own neighborhoods or in your own work environments, do you see people taking the opportunities that might be presenting themselves to do something innovative, creative, different that they wouldn’t have done or hadn’t done in the past? Steve?
__: About nine months ago I started as a side piece, funded by my consulting business, a new internet company. Because all the competition is gone, a lot of smaller stage, earlier stage companies.
PROFESSOR CHAKRAVORTI: So what does the company do? __: It’s a new technology to generate internet subscriptions, take advantage of the excess
ad inventory that now exists both on television and online.
PROFESSOR CHAKRAVORTI: Okay. And the competition is literally vaporized in this environment?
__: Yeah, I mean most of the VCs— I just heard about a deal last week where somebody raised, I think $8 million dollars with a $3 million pre for a company that’s doing business with Korea Telecom. VC’s are getting onerous and bankers are getting greedy; it’s the perfect time, if you can start something, to dive right in if you can afford it.