Chapter Three Innovative Business Approaches and Poverty: Toward a First Evaluation

Abstract

Business managers and leaders, and management researchers alike over the last decade have displayed an unprecedented interest in poverty related issues from several perspectives (Zadek 2004; Hopkins 1999), including marketing and market creation (Hammond and Prahalad 2002; Prahalad 2004), social entrepreneurship (Bornstein 1998; Ashoka Foundation), as well as the connections between nature conservation and poverty alleviation (PriceWaterHouseCoopers 2007). Research in this growing field has often tended to emphasize the identification of the potential contributions of business for poverty alleviation. However, it has not built on solid conceptual foundations of the key notions of poverty and development. This chapter aims to evaluate the potential contributions and shortcomings of three of these emerging business approaches to alleviating poverty using Amartya Sen’s definition and framework of development. The three business approaches evaluated here in light of this framework are: 1) the Bottom of Pyramid, 2) Social Entrepreneurship, and 3) Business and Nature Conservation. This chapter examines the potential contributions of business to poverty reduction and alleviation using the definition and framework of poverty proposed by Amartya Sen in Development as Freedom (1999). This chapter is organized in to three sections. We first introduce Sen’s definition and framework of development as well as the analytical framework we built from this framework to evaluate the

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 0 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.