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Testing the Protocol in the Field
In 2005, SC Johnson sponsored field testing of the Base of the Pyramid Protocol by funding interns from Cornell University, the University of North Carolina and the University of Michigan. A six-person team spent 10 weeks in Kenya, implementing the protocol and documenting its impact.
The team lived and worked alongside their hosts in Kenya, experiencing their daily lives as part of the immersion phase of the protocol. They also brought together business and local community groups for intensive business- generation workshops that explored how the stakeholders’ unique resources and strengths could be combined to bring value to all.
Justin DeKoszmovszky, an MBA graduate of Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and a member of the intern team, shared this perspective on the field testing. (Post graduation, Justin joined
Having worked with and studied under Stu Hart [Samuel C. Johnson Chair of Sustainable Global Enterprise and Professor of Management at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management] for a year, I knew about the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) Protocol™ and had become theoretically convinced of the profit opportunity and sustainability need for multinational companies to increase their involvement with poor consumers, the base of the pyramid.
These groups would become crucial partners for our Protocol work, for SC Johnson and for the development of a new route to market that would deliver the benefits of SC Johnson’s insect control and other products directly to BoP consumers. And all this thanks to a sweaty meeting held over a rake, a shovel and an open sewer. This was not business as usual but it was powerful!
The next step was to deepen our understanding of the BoP communities with which we were partnering with a homestay, literally living with our BoP partners. I woke every morning with the sun to milk the family’s cow or, to be honest, to try to milk the cow. (By the end of the weeklong homestay, I was actually a semi-competent milker.)
Though comedic, milking a cow may not be relevant to SC Johnson’s potential BoP business but it was hugely important and informative. Putting ourselves in the humbling position of learning a non-business specific skill from our BoP counterparts was proof that we were there to listen and understand deeply and truly partner with them — not to extract from them, force one-off solutions or provide philanthropy.
The Protocol pilot culminated with an Idea Generation Workshop that brought together community members, NGO partners and SC Johnson Kenya to co-develop ideas for mutually valuable enterprises. The workshop started with identifying what everyone in the room, this new network of partners, considered to be a successful sustainable enterprise in this community.
Once we had agreed upon a set of objectives and metrics, we identified the skills and resources in the community and amongst the partners in the room. With that, each group generated and refined new business ideas to meet the mutual objectives with the resources available. Several great ideas were generated but one in particular stood out, and that new enterprise and business model is being developed and piloted by SC Johnson in partnership with some of the groups we worked with in Kibera.
Before leaving Kenya, we had to ensure the viability and implementation of this new idea. We had to start ‘building the ecosystem,’ as the Protocol puts it, which meant solidifying the relationships between SC Johnson and the local groups with which it would partner, so that all could work together to develop this new mutually valuable enterprise.
It was clear from the start that the Protocol was not business as usual. We were generating deeper, more holistic relationships and very new insights into a potential consumer group by learning from them, living with them and partnering with them. We were co-creating new business models and routes to market that met the requirements and challenges of business in the BoP. It was crucial that the BoP enterprises created not be charity from any partner’s perspective. Rather, to be sustainable, the new initiative had to be valuable and profitable for everyone involved.
It was fantastic to be a part of something new, important and of massive potential on so many levels and I thank SC Johnson and the BoP Learning Lab at Cornell for the opportunity. It is clear now that only by immersion and engagement with the BoP, by innovating new business models and by creating new routes to market will we be able to use the power of SC Johnson and its products to improve the lives of those at the base of the pyramid. Simultaneously, of course, we’ll be growing SC Johnson’s developing markets presence, consumer base, sales and profits!
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