The following slideshow is a 3-hour lecture from Alexander Osterwalder at the Jacobs University in Bremen/ Germany in the context of impACT, a pan-European student competition in social entrepreneurship. Thought it would be interesting to share.
Yesterday we have launched an online community named bopity. It was set up to share and discuss material around the "base of the pyramid" (BOP).
One of the ICCL's workstreams is Business Model Innovation at the base of the pyramid, and we would like to encourage researchers, teachers and students from academia, representatives from the business world, members of NGOs, but also people at the bottom of the pyramid from all over the world to join us and share thoughts, insights and experiences, discuss what's hot and what's not in the BOP world, post business or job opportunities in the BOP area, share projects, case studies and know-how and all kinds of other things around the base of the pyramid.
It's a community which is free for everyone to access. Please feel free to join if you're interested in cooperating in this area, and please invite your colleagues and friends too if they are. And most of all: Please contribute. A community can only be as interesting as the contributions from its members, both in quality and quantity.
A few days ago the academic year has ended, and we are looking back on an exciting and successful time. We have started many new projects, continued to bring forward existing ones, extended our relationships with many of our corporate partners and built up new corporate relations too. There is reason to be proud of what we have achieved, and we are grateful for the many valuable contacts we have, both in academia and in business - People who continue to ask us the relevant questions, give us important input and feedback, and are working with us in true partnerships.
But we have also made a leap in the process of completing our team, and we have defined and refined our identity as a group of researchers from two of the leading European academic institutions at the intersection of management and social science, by setting up four Centres of Expertise where our research is anchored, and also by putting together this website, which has gone live in March 2009 and has been growing ever since, with information about our lab, with the latest news concerning our four workstreams, and now also with a blog where we are planning to interact with you, our visitors, online.
Please feel free to comment on our blog posts - it's simple and doesn't take a lot of time, and the more of a fruitful dialogue we can create, the better it will be. Just click on the "View Post" link at the bottom of a blog post, then on "Add new comment", and you get the text boxes to fill in your comment.
We wish you all a lovely summer and nice vacations, wherever you may spend them.