Chapter 7. BoP Venture Formation for Scale

by Allen Hammond, Ashoka

Social enterprises do good works. But unless they achieve a significant scale, they aren’t in a position to serve millions of BoP customers or to help reshape economies. Author Allen Hammond argues for a combination of both bottom-up and top-down enterprise formation to better reach and serve BoP markets, and explains how that productive mix can be accomplished. Additionally, he suggests, BoP entrepreneurs can also build business ecosystems (rather than stand-alone ventures) to support scale. Hammond explains how “hybrid” organizations can serve that purpose—and provides insights from a real-world example.

There are many social enterprises focused on alleviating some aspect ...

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