Looking Up.

April 28, 2010 12:27 PM

Surviving at the Base of the Pyramid A look at the ways and means those at the Base of the Pyramid across the developing world earn a living by the repair, reuse, repurposing, resale and recycling of goods. Like Dharavi; home to more than a million people.and a thriving business centre propelled by thousands of micro-entrepreneurs who have created as many as 4500 to 5000 small scale industries most of which recycle the discarded waste of Mumbai’s 19 million citizens. Ideas like The Safe Bottle Lamp project. winner of 2009 BBC WorldChallenge. Indian social entrepreneurs are going global cooking gas from pine needles- solar powered hearing aids. and in San Diego CA Carbon Manna Unlimited have announced the establishment of the "Micro" Revolutions Institute(SM), the world's first think tank to focus exclusively on developing novel, sustainable, open-source, low-cost and immediately implementable micro-economic, micro-financial and micro-ecological paradigms or mechanisms to benefit the Developing World.
posted by adamvasco (6 comments total)

C.K. Prahalad
posted by growli at 1:15 PM on April 28, 2010

C.K. Prahalad
posted by kliuless at 1:21 PM on April 28, 2010

Yes I should have mentioned this related post
posted by adamvasco at 1:22 PM on April 28, 2010

I was wondering if that name was just some weirdness from the press release, but no, it's actually called 'the "Micro" Revolutions Institute'. I think that's the first time I've seen that particular punctuation abomination enshrined in the name of an entity.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 1:40 PM on April 28, 2010

The blog is great - nice combo of good pictures and concise text.
posted by harriet vane at 7:25 AM on April 29, 2010

never heard of any of these "micro" people nor the need for the quotation marks through out that press release. odd and discomforting... greenwash imho but I could be wrong otoh prolly not. I expect there's going to be a lot more of it from now onwards, now that we're already seeing blog posts to the tune of "What next after CK Prahalad?" etc

on one hand one could say that its a good thing this area is getting traction but on the other its an extremely worrying trend.

Look at this, and tell me what one can do to counteract these kinds of things?

"What really ticked me off was when I heard that the Government was providing these napkins at a highly subsidized rate. This would mean that it would buy those napkins at a higher cost from elsewhere. What is the need of that, when my technology provides with a similar product at a cheaper price and at the same time generates a lot of rural employment," says Muruganatham.

Muruganatham laments that the newly announced central government scheme apart from involving a lot of corruption, will effectively kill an innovation that has the potential of providing employment to millions of Indians, especially women.

Imho, corruption, politics and big co's like P&G desperate to sell are going to greenwash their CSR activities while putting these very grassroots innovators out of business is the trend that really concerns me.

BAH.

thanks for the post, adamvasco
posted by infini at 11:30 AM on April 29, 2010