Challenges and Constraints in Building Business Models to Fight Poverty

Today\u2019s grand challenges as sustainability, climate change, and poverty have raised vast attention of academics and practitioners both in developed and developing contexts. The United Nations, the World Bank, and governments as well as academics are converging in the relevance of finding solutions to fight poverty and increase the well-being of all humans (Oxfam 2017;World Bank Group 2018; Cumming et al. 2020). A recent solution to alleviate poverty has been referred to ventures as social entrepreneurship (Shepherd et al. 2020; Si et al. 2020), including all the tentative ways by which businesses are trying to solve the societal issues regarding poverty while also pursuing market dynamics and logics (Mair and Marti 2006; Saebi et al. 2019). This entry, then, has the purpose to effectively present the challenges and constraints that such social enterprises face in building their business model to fight poverty (Seelos and Mair 2005; Santos et al. 2015; Dembek et al. 2019)

Value co-creation in multinational enterprises’ services marketing at the bottom-of-the-pyramid markets

This book chapter addresses determinants of value creation by multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the still largely neglected research context of bottom of the pyramid (BoP) markets. Consisting of consumers living below the poverty line, BoP markets exhibit significantly different characteristics compared to the affluent developed or the aspirational emerging markets. Dealing with a wide range of diversity within a market where it is difficult to obtain reliable, generalisable information means that MNEs tend to face challenges upon entering them. Yet, the potential demand offered by BoP markets cannot be ignored and MNE’s have shown increasingly that they are willing to innovate market-specific approaches to cater to BoP needs. We discuss the applicability of service-dominant (S-D) logic in subsistence context and identify commitment to the market, strategic CSR, and service quality as key firm-level determinants of effective service marketing in BoP markets. We further identify social trust, technological outreach and performance orientation characteristics in target BoP market as key country-level determinants. Finally, the book chapter offers a number of academic and managerial implications.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed