Innovation, Creative Destruction and Sustainability

OVERVIEW: Nearly 4½ billion people, all over the world, earn less than three dollars a day. These are largely rural, largely uneducated—but not stupid—individuals whom we do not understand and on whom corporations have never seriously tried to focus. The assumption has always been that this is a market for governments or the not-for-profit sector to worry about, sort of like an international division of labor. However, this base of the pyramid is where the biggest business opportunities lie. As technologists, it is the early market that we should be looking at.