Keywords

Base of the Pyramid, BoP, competitive advantage

Disciplines

Business Administration, Management, and Operations

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new framework to measure the success of projects at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP), based on the relational view of strategy (Dyer and Singh, 1998; Lavie, 2006; Mesquita et al., 2008), and we test the framework using new case studies. We argue that the success of BoP projects depends on relation-specific resources and capabilities resulting from partnerships among participating organizations. Typical partners involved in a BoP project are firms that make a product or a service designed for BoP customers, a public or private agency that has local knowledge and presence, and a BoP community that uses the product. The relational view model can help assess the sustainable success of a BoP project because it examines unique interorganizational relationships and relation-specific combination of resources designed to create sustainable value (Dyer and Singh, 1998; Dyer, 1996). We apply this important model of strategic analysis to two new BoP projects.

Original Citation

Sánchez, C.M. and Schmid, A.S. (2013), "Base of the pyramid success: a relational view", South Asian Journal of Global Business Research, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 59-81. https://doi.org/10.1108/20454451311303293

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