Good bottom-of-the-pyramid strategy in India

FRONT PAGE: "India Engineers A Market: Its Poor," by Eric Bellman, Wall Street Journal, 20 October 2009.

This, to me, is the real ground zero of India's business ingenuity, the stuff that will truly change the world for the better.

"Reverse innovation" examples cited: the Nano from Tata (mais oui), a tiny stove that avoids the usual wood fuel (pellets and a "gasifer technology" (beats the hell out of me, but indoor pollution is a HUGE Gap killer), and a refrigerator disguised as a cooler!

Some truly brilliant stuff, and the future of the emerging global middle class.

Frontiers to be conquered in the best way possible.

Comments

[rob]

There are two others that I read about, heard about, over the last year or so that fit into this bucket as well - both related to medical tech.

The first was a modification to how medical tests are done. From what I understand/remember, the media that has traditionally been used is very temperature sensitive, has a short shelf life, etc. The change was that some college students got together and created a new media that, in effect, is simply based on coffee filter paper. The capillary effect of the coffee filter paper draws the blood/fluid sample through the paper so that it hits the media and voila, a test result. The new test is VERY stable as well with a longer shelf life.

The other example was taking a standard hand mixer and with a couple of easy/quick modifications it was able to be converted to a manually operated centrifuge to spin samples for testing.