Based on Groundbreaking Research

The first BoP “Learning Lab” began in the US as a consortium of companies, NGOs, entrepreneurs, multilateral organizations, and academics working to discover and implement business solutions to global poverty.

Established in 2000, it grew out of the research and writings of Dr. Stuart Hart in the late 1990s.  His pivotal article, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” co-authored with C.K. Prahalad, provided the intellectual foundation for a business agenda that focused on improving the lives of the approximately 4 billion people in the world who lived on less than $4 US per day.

Initially a loosely and fragmented community of academics and practitioners, today the BoP Global Network has become a vibrate community of 25 BoP Labs and Innovation Centers on all continents that engage in knowledge creation and dissemination about the theory and practice of creating sustainable businesses focused on the base of the economic pyramid (see Appendix 1).  Collectively, today the BoP Global Labs speak more than 16 languages, with initiatives in more than 34 countries, across 27 sectors.