Got a BOP idea? Join the Business Plan Challenge

You got a business idea that improves living standards in developing countries? Then join the Challenge of the Business in Development Network and send in your business plan until May 31st 2007. There are no restrictions on nationality or age, everyone can participate. You could win counseling, prize money and investors. I am curious to see what great ideas will be generated in this initiative.

The Business in Development (BiD) Challenge is the first international business plan competition for entrepreneurship and development. The BiD Challenge offers entrepreneurs worldwide the opportunity to develop and execute business plans that improve living standards in developing countries at a profit. Join now and develop YOUR business plan for poverty reduction and profit.

Essay competition: Private Sector Development

The International Finance Corporation (IFC, the private sector arm of the World Bank) and the Financial Times announce their second annual Essay Competition.

"The Competition is soliciting action-oriented essays that:

* Provide insight into current Private Sector Development (PSD) research
* Develop and support the implementation of leading-edge PSD initiatives
* Strike a balance between conceptual and practical considerations for private-sector involvement in developing countries, and the effect of that involvement on development
* Reflect innovative, data-supported research resulting from the author’s own professional or academic work
* Target economic & financial policymakers, the international financial community and/or international domestic investors"

Eligible participants: Everyone

Entries accepted: April 25 - September 30, 2007

Prizes: Winner: US$ 20,000; 2nd & 3rd: US$ 10,000 each; 4th-6th: US$ 5,000 each

Be sure to check out last year's winning essays.

More information and registration

Innovatorz.org helps social entrepreneurs to tell their stories

Innovatorz.org is a young non-profit startup that has wants to publish stories about successful social entrepreneurs under the bold tagline "you've probably never heard about the most important people in the world". The company plans to help the social entrepreneurs with digital publications ("audio and video podcasts, blogs and slideshows"). Although the site has not a lot of content yet, the founders plan to have 200 social entrepreneurs blogging by the beginning of 2008. Godspeed from here!

Jeffrey Sachs lecture podcasts

Ben over at Technology, Health & Development notes that pop-star economist Jeffrey Sachs and best-selling author of "The End of Poverty" gives a series of lectures at the Royal Sociaty in London which are broadcast by BBC's Radio 4. MP3s of the lectures are available as a podcast for one week after the air date. I haven't had the time to check out the first one, but I guess they will be exciting, given Sachs' opinionated and entertaining style.

The schedule and topics are:

Lecture 1: Wednesday 11 April 2007, 9am
Bursting at the Seams

Lecture 2: Wednesday 18 April, 8pm
Survival in the Anthropocene

Lecture 3: Wednesday 25 April, 8pm
The Great Convergence

Lecture 4: Wednesday 2 May, 8pm
Poverty in the Midst of Plenty

Lecture 5: Wednesday 9 May, 8pm
A New Politics for a New Age

Old wine in new skins: Prahalad's "New Social Compact"

Over at NextBillion.net Al Hammond celebrates C.K. Prahalad's and Jeb Brugman's new article "Cocreating Business’s New Social Compact" in the Harvard Business Review as "transformative" and "an idea as radical as his and Stuart Hart's suggestion 5 years ago that there was significant value to be found in business engagement at the base of the pyramid".

So what is to it? Basically, Prahalad tells us that NGOs and Multinationals should partner up and co-create products and services for the BoP.

As Brugman and Prahalad picture it, there is an initial "stage of pre-convergence", where companies and NGOs fight over the nature and speed of deregulation and the companies’ conduct, especially in developing countries. From there onwards, the process of convergence comes in three stages:

Stage 1: Companies and NGOs realize they have to coexist. They look for ways to influence each other. Some corporations and NGOs execute joint social responsibility projects.

Stage 2: Some companies get into bottom-of-the-pyramid segments and niche markets even as NGOs set up businesses in those markets. Companies and NGOs try to learn from, and work with, each other.

Stage 3: Companies and NGOs enter into cocreation business relationships. Cocreation entails the development of business models in which companies become a key part of NGOs’ capacity to deliver value and vice versa.

Sounds pretty neat, but you have the feeling that you have heard that before? That is probably because you did.

Apart from the massive literature on Public-Private-Partnerships (which has at least overlaps with the specific NGO-MNC partnership), Stewart Hart wrote about the specific need to partner up with NGOs it in his seminal "Capitalism at the Crossroads", where he also gives multiple examples of working partnerships (chapter: working with non-traditional partners):

In our analysis of BOP ventures, Ted London and I found that successful strategies (like ApproTEC's) rely heavily on non-traditional partners, including non-profit organisations, community groups, and local (even village-level) governments. ... As another example, Bata, a leading retailer of shoes with operations throughout the developing world, has entered into an innovative partnership with the NGO Care in Bangladesh to gain access to rural areas in the country...

The idea came also through in the BoP protocol (even coined as co-creation), which places a huge emphasis on ecosystem creation and selecting the right partners. And funnily, Prahalad and Al Hammond himself pointed out how important it is to forge partnerships with NGOs on their 2002 article "Serving the poor, profitably" (p.17). And that is only three sources I can think of from the top of my head - there must be a lot more.

Prahalad and Brugman have found a nice way of systematising the process of convergence and putting it into three easily comprehensible stages - but is it a "transformative vision" or a "radical idea"? I don't think so. The "Profit at the BoP" idea was radical because it disrupted traditional thinking: You businesses are stupid because you are missing out on a huge opportunity. It is not only OK to do business at the BoP, but it makes sense in terms of shareholder value. The "New Social Compact" on the other hand describes the traditional conflict of NGOs and companies and suggests that is it disruptive to think of NGOs and MNCs as partners. I'd rather think that this is by now conventional wisdom. But then again, is it bad to educate the public (ie. HBR readers) once again about the opportunities of cooperation at the BoP? Of course not.

Social Entrepreneurship in pictures: Winners of Development Marketplace photo contest

World Bank's Development Marketplace hosted a photography contest and has picked three winners:

• Training African Rats as a Cheap Diagnostic Tool (Tanzania)
• Ha Tien - Handbags - Habitats (Vietnam)
• Protecting the Environment: Profiting from Garbage (Burkina Faso)

In a media society craving for striking visual images it is great to have sensible projects documented by great photography.

Why Paul Wolfowitz fails

This lengthy but interesting portrait of Paul Wolfowitz in the New Yorker describes his mindset in a rather favourable way (ie. compared to European standards: he might not be the ultra-hawkish American imperialist he is often portrayed to be) but shows why he is doing a bad job as president of the World Bank: He is a strategist, and not a manager. (And of course, there are some other problems). Link