ABSTRACT
There is no question that a lot of innovation is taking place at the BOP. Stories such as the Tata Nano (the $2,500 car), the ChotuKool (a cheap, portable refrigerator that requires no electricity), GE’s MAC 800 (a smaller and cheaper ECG machine that’s sold to rural clinics and visiting nurses), and Unilever’s Project Shakti (which uses female entrepreneurs to sell Unilever products to women in remote villages) have certainly caught the public’s imagination and have received a lot of attention in the press. But they are not the only ones. There are numerous examples of other (less well-known) companies from the BOP that are using innovation not only to grow in their home markets, but also to expand to Western mainstream markets. Detailed accounts of what they are doing can be found in the growing body of academic literature on this topic, such as Anderson and Markides (2007), Govindarajan and Trimble (2012), Kumar (2009), London and Hart (2011), Ramamurt and Singh (2009), van Agtmael (2007), and Zeng and Williamson (2007).
