Playing in Invisible Markets: Innovations in the Market for Toilets to Harness the Economic Power of the Poor

Sanitation is at the heart of not only environmental security but also food security and health. Today about 41% of the global population or about 2.6 billion people do not have access to toilets and about 42,000 people die every week due to drinking water polluted with faecal matter. The problem is most acute in India, China, many countries of Africa and a few countries of Latin America. Why is there such a crisis in the toilets market? How much of the present problem is due to a lack of supply and how much is it due to a lack of demand? What is the optimal role of the State, the firms and the NPOs? The present paper attempts to give some insight on the above questions through the case study of the market for toilets for the poor in India. It examines the toilet history and achievements of India, the innovations in the market for toilets targeting the group at the bottom of the income pyramid and the factors that influence the adoption and usage of toilets in an Indian coastal village, in order to infer answers to the above questions.Toilets, Innovation, India, Health, Hygiene, Sanitation, BOP, Income Inequality, Empowerment, Entrepreneurship, Government Policy

Voluntary agreements and community development as CSR in innovation strategies

The present paper examines how an innovating firm decides between two forms of voluntary agreements (VA) in a context, where a non-governmental organization (NGO) rather than a regulator watches over citizens' interests. The innovation generates profit and consumer surplus as well as environmental damage. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) within the innovation process is considered in terms of a redistribution of profit towards community development, with or without additional abatement efforts via a VA. Bargaining between firm and NGO yields the amount allocated to community development. The model demonstrates that the firm's choice of VA hinges on the tradeoffs between appropriating the full innovation profit and paying a higher lump sum towards community development or sacrificing some of the innovation profit by lowering innovation effort, but gaining in terms of paying a lesser amount towards community development. CSR with abatement is unlikely in the case of radical innovations. There is also a clear divergence of interests between the firm, the NGO and the State for some parameter configurations, which are duly identified.Corporate social responsibility, voluntary agreements, community development, donations, innovation

R&D cooperation, asymmetric technological capabilities and rationale for technology parks

Starting from the premise that firms are distinct in terms of their capacity to create radical product innovations, the present paper attempts to explore how firms choose between different forms of R&D cooperation and their consequences for social welfare. It studies a duopolistic market, where firms have to choose between R&D competition, a cost sharing alliance, an information sharing alliance or an R&D cartel. The paper demonstrates that asymmetry has an impact on alliance choice and social welfare. With similar firms, the cost sharing alliance will be preferred to R&D competition or any other form of collaboration. With significant asymmetry no alliance may be formed. In terms of social welfare, any alliance is preferable to R&D competition and the R&D cartel is the best. Given this inherent contradiction between private preferences and optimal social choice, the paper provides a rationale for public investment in terms of science and technology parks to promote R&D cartels. --R&D competition,R&D cooperation,technology parks

Can Social Externalities Solve the Small Coalitions Puzzle in International Environmental Agreements?

A puzzle in the literature on the formation of coalitions supporting International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) is that if an IEA leads to substantial gains, then it will not be supported by many countries. The non-cooperative game theoretic literature highlights the “small coalitions†puzzle by which only a small number of countries are willing to sign an environmental convention. In these models, a global coalition comprising all countries and generating significant benefits is not sustainable. Moreover they indicate that greater the number of countries in the coalition, higher the incentive of signatories to not respect their engagement. The present paper resolves this puzzle by introducing social externalities, in order to explain why some treaties can be sustained by nearly all countries, while others can be supported only by a handful.

Experimentation with Strategy and the Evolution of Dynamic Capability in the Indian Pharmaceutical Sector

This paper demonstrates that radical regulatory changes can be tantamount to technological revolutions by studying Indian pharmaceutical firms. It shows that radical regulatory changes such as the Indian Patent Act of 1970, the New Industrial Policy of 1991 and the signing of TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights System) in 1995 served to open up new economic opportunities and constraints in the wake of which the winners and losers were selected as a function of the dynamic firm capabilities most appropriate for the new market environment.International Marketing, R&D Management, India, Pharmaceutical Sector, Corporate Strategy

Determinants Of the Prevalence of Diarrhoea in Adolescents Attending School: A Case Study of an Indian Village School

In developing countries, including India, diarrhoea is a leading killer throughout the age pyramid. However, most of the medical literature on the determinants of diarrhoea focuses only on young children or the elderly, with health policy mainly targeting the former. Thus, the present article attempts to contribute to a better understanding of the determinants of diarrhoea in adolescents -- the understudied population. The paper develops a model using the medical literature, refines it to fit an Indian village context and tests the hypotheses identified through administering a questionnaire to 114 adolescents in an Indian village school. Results confirm the well known importance of household sanitation. In addition, the contribution of the present study is to assert that access to school toilets and usage of school toilets are also crucial. Furthermore, usage of toilets at school varies as a function of gender and the existence of a toilet in the student's household. Finally, the installation of toilets in schools is not enough, sustainable financial models must be found to maintain toilets and induce students to use them

Taking innovation to the poor: Lessons from sanitation activists in India

Parallel session 6. Pro-poor innovationPresented at GLOBELICS 2009, 7th International Conference, 6-8 October, Dakar, Senegal.There is an emerging body of literature that examines how pro-poor innovations should be created and what business models should accompany them. However, there is little on actual implementation practises and the present paper attempts to fill this void by analyzing the findings of the literature and confronting them with the actual field practises of sanitation activists in India. It demonstrates that the common thread that unifies progressive sanitation activists is their adoption of the ‘market based approach’, which works from the premise that if the facilities constructed are to be used efficiently, first a real demand must be created among end-users. Market failures stemming from the demand side are shown to be due to problems of expressions of demand as a function of perception of needs and their mismatching with perceptions of the value of the innovation which is targeted to eliminate the market failure in the first place. It also identifies how activists go beyond the academic model of assessing need, appropriateness of technology and demand to include practises for ‘accompaniment’, ‘sustainable maintenance’ and ‘generation of knowledge, demand and innovation spillovers’ in an endogenous fashion, providing an alternative to the ‘centralized platform delivery’ model’

An Empirical Comparison of Consumer Innovation Adoption Models: Implications for Subsistence Marketplaces

So called “pro-poor” innovations may improve consumer wellbeing in subsistence marketplaces. However, there is little research that integrates the area with the vast literature on innovation adoption. Using a questionnaire where respondents were asked to provide their evaluations about a mobile banking innovation, this research fills this gap by providing empirical evidence of the applicability of existing innovation adoption models in subsistence marketplaces. The study was conducted in Bangladesh among a geographically dispersed sample. The data collected allowed an empirical comparison of models in a subsistence context. The research reveals the most useful models in this context to be the Value Based Adoption Model and the Consumer Acceptance of Technology model. In light of these findings and further examination of the model comparison results the research also shows that consumers in subsistence marketplaces are not just motivated by functionality and economic needs. If organizations cannot enhance the hedonic attributes of a pro-poor innovation, and reduce the internal/external constraints related to adoption of that pro-poor innovation, then adoption intention by consumers will be lower

Role of WASH and Agency in Health: A study of isolated rural communities in Nilgiris and Jalpaiguri

The objective of the Swachh Bharath Mission (SBM) or Clean India Mission of the Indian Government is to eliminate open defecation in India through installation of toilets and triggering of behavioural change by 2019. The problem is most daunting in isolated communities with poor WASH infrastructure and local agencies with scarce resources. In India, tribal communities, living near forests and along mountain ranges are among the most isolated, which means that the study of the impact of WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene behaviour) and the effectiveness of local agencies responsible for public hygiene in such communities is pertinent for our research query. Thus, this working paper presents the results of a study of 20 villages located in two districts, Nilgiris and Jalpaiguri, in two distinct Indian states - Tamil Nadu and West Bengal respectively. The central research question is: What is the role of WASH infrastructure and capabilities and local agencies in containing the incidence of excreta related diseases in isolated rural Indian communities? A novel multi-level model is developed and estimated and further validated through focus research groups. It confirms that disease incidence is jointly determined by the quantity as well as the quality of WASH. The role of agency seems to matter more at village level rather than at the household level