ABSTRACT
Innovations in emerging economies have attracted increasing attention from practitioners and academics. Many papers have discussed the nature and the scale of the potential market at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) (Prahalad and Lieberthal, 1998; Dawar and Chattopadhyay, 2002). However, few have looked at the appropriate type of innovation to match this untapped mass market. One of the distinctive features of BOP markets is that, due to their very low income levels and harsh living conditions, this population of nearly four billion people requires robust products with basic functions at ultra low prices (Prahalad and Lieberthal, 1998; Dawar and Chattopadhyay, 2002). Meeting this need requires more than simply downsizing or adapting existing products developed for advanced economies, because those products would still exceed what customers in BOP markets can afford (Inkpen and Ramaswami, 2006; London and Hart, 2004; Ray and Ray, 2010). Hence, Hart and Christensen (2002) suggested that companies need to consider the disruptive innovation (DI) approach when they take a “great leap” downwards in order to exploit the “non-consumption” market.
