Profits are critically important for ventures targeting the bottom of the economic pyramid—the more than 4 billion people who individually earn less than $1,500 per year. Compared with a social responsibility project, a profitable business stands a better chance of being able to increase its scale and impact.

bottom of the pyramid (BOP), also called base of the pyramid, term in economics that refers to the poorest two-thirds of the economic human pyramid, a group of more than four billion people living in abject poverty.

In global terms, this is the 2.7 billion people who live on less than $2.50 a day. Management scholar CK Prahalad popularised the idea of this demographic as a profitable consumer base in his 2004 book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, written alongside Stuart Hart.

He co-authored “Core Competence of the Corporation” with Gary Hamel; and “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” with Stuart L. Hart, about business opportunity in serving the Bottom of the Pyramid….

COIMBATORE KRISHNARAO PRAHALAD, universally known as C.K., was the most creative management thinker of his generation. He revolutionised thinking on two big subjects, business strategy and economic development, and made a significant contribution to a third, innovation.

3/4/2017. An Hodgson Bio. Share: Euromonitor International has identified India, Nigeria, China, Indonesia and South Africa as the top five bottom of the pyramid (BOP) markets.

2The challenges to reach Base of the Pyramid (BoP) population are many. First of all, this market faces higher transaction costs. All these factors make the distribution to BoP be more costly and challenging. 3New strategies and business models were developed in recent years to reach BoP in an efficient way.

For more than a decade now, Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad has been the best-known management guru from India. Professor of Strategy at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Prahalad shot to fame with his book Competing for the Future, which he co-authored with Gary Hamel.

C. K. Prahalad
Gareebi Hatayen, Munafha Kamaye/Authors

From that point Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad can be called a guru. He was insightful and definitely provocative. He was an interesting combination of an academic and a practitioner. His thought process got formulated by observing businesses in action and his ideas thus formulated altered many businesses.

A core competency is a concept in management theory introduced by C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel. It can be defined as “a harmonized combination of multiple resources and skills that distinguish a firm in the marketplace” and therefore are the foundation of companies’ competitiveness.

Producers are at the bottom of the pyramid because they are able to transform the sun’s energy into a large amount of plant energy through the process of photosynthesis. Producers are the base of energy for most food chains and food webs. Animals that eat plants make up the next level.

C.K Prahalad posits that there is an immense fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid by C.K. Prahalad reframed the world’s poorest citizens as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers. He believed these consumers could be tapped to help create opportunities for economic growth.

Examples of BoP business. Microcredit. One example of “bottom of the pyramid” is the growing microcredit market in South Asia, particularly in Bangladesh. With technology being steadily cheaper and more ubiquitous, it is becoming economically efficient to “lend tiny amounts of money to people with even tinier assets”.

Hart and Simanis have led the development of the Base of the Pyramid Protocol, an entrepreneurial process that guides companies in developing business partnerships with income-poor communities in order to “co-create businesses and markets that mutually benefit the companies and the communities”.

The pyramid is a graphical depiction of inverse relationship between two variables as one increases the other decreases. We find that the percent of world wealth and the percent of world population controlling it are related with each other in an inverse relation.