Excerpted from Fortune, “Products for the other 3 billion” By Michael V. Copeland, April 1, 2009
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Jim Patell … operates out of Stanford’s design school, where he teaches a class called Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability … the class mission: to teach a new generation of entrepreneurs to use their business and engineering smarts to design and sell products – profitably – for the developing world.
Some of the students – a mix of would-be MBAs, engineers, and designers – truly are do-gooders, but a fair number think building good, cheap products is a skill any corporation would value.
“We can fill a gap, with an approach that goes beyond a fast profit motive.”
For the smart, ambitious students in his classes …professional success and saving the planet aren’t mutually exclusive.
Two such budding entrepreneurs … make cheap, solar-powered lights to replace the kerosene and diesel lamps so common in the developing countries of Asia and Africa.
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Often the approach involves combining cutting-edge technology with widely available products that are moving down the cost curve.
One application … make cheap, solar-powered lights to replace the kerosene and diesel lamps so common in the developing countries of Asia and Africa.
D.light, for example, marries next-generation light-emitting diodes (LEDs), proprietary power-management tools, and increasingly cheap solar panels. As a result, D.light is able to offer poor communities an affordable alternative to kerosene, which is ubiquitous but hazardous … The D.light lamps sell for about $25, steep for someone earning $1 per day, but … the quality of light was so good that people with the D.light lamps were able to do more work at night and increase their income.
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Empowering would-be customers is one of the mantras of Patell’s class … Patell doesn’t expect every student to start a company, but he does demand that every product in the class offer poor consumers tools for their own microenterprises.
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Capitalists in Silicon Valley are starting to take notice of the projects coming out of the Stanford course. In November, D.light secured $6 million in funding from … venture capital firms, to ramp up production and get its lamps into markets, initially in India and Africa … the financiers think D.light can model itself after another successful enterprise in the developing world: the cellphone industry.
Device manufacturers … are selling millions of handsets in rural parts of India, China, and Africa, places that in many cases don’t have centralized electricity. But even some of the poorest of the poor will pony up several months’ salary for the benefits of connectivity …
Edit by SAC
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Full Article:
http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/01/technology/copeland_developing.fortune/index.htm
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