Business Model Innovation at the Base of the Pyramid

How can social entrepreneurs, NGOs and companies deliver solutions to poverty and deprivation in scalable and economically sustainable ways? This is the question at the heart of the LSE Innovation Co-Creation Lab (ICCLab) headed by Professor Harry Barkema. ICCLab works with a community of practitioners to create evidence-based management knowledge applicable at the base of the pyramid - among the world's poorest 2.5 billion people. This knowledge sheds light on topics such as organisation, business models, ecosystems and partnerships and is anchored in a range of academic disciplines, from management and organisations to anthropology and sociology.

ICCLab turns this knowledge into practical impact through workshops, field projects, popular courses and through innovative digital dissemination tools. The lab's community of partner consists of world-class social entrepreneurs, NGOs and multinational companies, such as Honeycare, Riders for Health and Tata.

Research fellowships and travel grants for this programme have been supported by the LSE-TISS programme since 2010. Three PhD students, involved with this programme at LSE, were supported with Jamsetji Tata Fellowships during 2011-2013.

News from ICCLab

  • ICCLab's Abdelnour on Economic Ideals: Gandhian and Neoliberal Logics in India
    ICCLab's Samer Abdelnour and his collaborators, Babita Bhatt and Israr Qureshi, have published a highly topical article dealing with enterprise logics in the UN Research Institute for Social Development's Viewpoints series. Social and solidarity economies differ greatly in terms of their underlying logics - the values, beliefs, rules and material practices by which people and [...]
  • Ping Fu at the LSE: From Mao's Child Soldier to 3D printing revolutionary
    ICCLab's Vili Lehdonvirta is chairing a public lecture tonight by Ping Fu, an entrepreneur with an amazing story to tell – from the heartbreaking story of her youth in China in the grip of the Cultural Revolution, to her exile and eventual emergence as one of the innovators leading today's 3D printing revolution. Digital Reality [...]
  • ICCLab's Abdelnour on the dangers of simplification in Stanford Social Innovation Review
    How did efficient cookstoves end up being sold as tools that are supposed to solve rape? As private activism plays an increasingly visible part in humanitarian and development interventions, ICCLab member Samer Abdelnour cautions against portraying far-away crises as 'manageable problems' that can be solved through simple technical solutions. Read his article If Stoves Could [...]