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Entrepreneurial Best Practices Series



Presented by:   GSVC


Designing for the Base of the Pyramid:
Business Models that Work for the Poor


Tuesday, December 7, 2010
6:30-8:30pm
Wells Fargo Room - Haas School of Business

 

Program Information and Speaker Biography

 

Video (video on YouTube site):

 

 

Program Information and Speaker Biography


The Base of the Pyramid (BoP) market is the largest, fastest growing, and least penetrated market in the world. With 3.7 billion people, aggregate purchasing power of US$2.3 trillion, and average annual growth rate of 8%, the business world is beginning to awaken to the unparalleled market opportunity at the BoP. To effectively access this market, we must rethink the design of business. Join us as we talk with industry innovators as to how entrepreneurs can redesign product, supply chain, marketing, and pricing to access the opportunity at the Base of the Pyramid.



FEATURED SPEAKERS

 

Jonathan Cedar   David Green   Roxanne Miller
Jonathan Cedar

CEO and co-founder
BioLite		  

David Green

Social Entrepreneur
MacArthur Fellow


  

Roxanne Miller, MBA 09

Moderator
Social Venture Consultant



SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES


Jonathan Cedar
CEO and co-founder of BioLite

 

Jonathan Cedar is the CEO and co-founder of BioLite, a company that develops clean burning biomass energy solutions for "Base of the Pyramid" homes. He is committed to bringing together technology, user centric design and innovative business structures to serve the needs of underserved communities around the world. Before founding BioLite in 2009, Jonathan worked as a Senior Design Engineer at Smart Design in New York where he developed products for OXO, Pepsi, World Kitchen, Staples and Lego. Jonathan received a BA in Engineering and Environmental Science from Dartmouth College. He also enjoys playing the banjo.


 

David Green
Social Entrepreneur, MacArthur Fellow

David Green has worked with many organizations to make medical technology and health care services sustainable, affordable and accessible to all. David helped establish Aurolab (India), to produce affordable intraocular lenses (now has 8% of the global market share) and suture. He has helped develop high-volume, quality eye care programs that are affordable to the poor and self-sustaining from user fees, including Aravind Eye Hospital in India - which performs over 300,000 surgeries per year - 70 percent of the care is provided free of charge or below - cost, yet the hospital is able to generate substantial surplus revenue.

Within this paradigm of ‘humanizing capitalism', he now works as an Ashoka VP (since 2004) to create social investing instruments to support sustainable social enterprises (in eye care and solar energy). He also helped create Conversion Sound, a social enterprise to make affordable hearing devices with a novel fitting; and Quantum Catch, to make optical products affordable.

He graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor in General Studies (1978) and a Masters degree in Public Health (1982). He is a MacArthur Fellow, Ashoka Fellow and is recognized by Schwab Foundation as a leading social entrepreneur. He is the recipient of the 2009 “Spirit of Helen Keller” award for humanitarian efforts in blindness prevention and is the recipient of the 2009 University of Michigan Humanitarian Service Award.


Roxanne Miller, MBA 09 (moderator)
Social Venture Consultant

Roxanne Miller is working this fall at the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation to support the student organizers of the Global Social Venture Competition. After receiving her MBA from Haas in 2009, Roxanne was selected for a fellowship with the Grassroots Business Fund and lived in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania for a year while working to launch a pilot program for delivering consulting support to small business entrepreneurs in Tanzania and Bolivia.

In the field of social entrepreneurship, Roxanne has worked with the Draper Richards Foundation to conduct a review of their portfolio, consulted with Unitus to develop their approach to social performance metrics, and volunteered as a Kiva fellow. Prior to graduate school, Roxanne worked in the small business divisions of Yahoo! and American Express after starting her career at Oliver Wyman.

During her time at Haas, Roxanne was the president of Global Initiatives at Haas, Judging chair for the GSVC, was selected by her peers for the Haas Service and Leadership award and received the Gloria W. Appel Award for Outstanding Leadership in Entrepreneurship from the Lester Center. Roxanne holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from the University of Pennsylvania.



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