The Anatomy Of Market Creation: Insights From The Base Of The Pyramid

Abstract

This dissertation is an action-research inquiry into the unique strategic management challenge of creating a new market for an altogether new product form. The research was conducted over a four-year period while working as a project manager and consultant to two "greenfield" corporate ventures whose goal was to profitably serve the unmet needs of impoverished slum and village communities in Kenya and India. In both ventures, the new product and service offerings that were developed and commercialized were ones for which the targeted communities had no comparable, much less equivalent, products against which they could benchmark. The principle finding from this dissertation concerns the strategic innovation processes effective for catalyzing the consumer sense-making necessary for adopting a product for which there are no consumption benchmarks. Current management innovation strategies for market creation around a new product form leave undertheorized and un-addressed the issue of personal-level consumer learning in the face of "discontinuous products." This dissertation draws together field learnings and experiences from the Kenya and India ventures with theoretical contributions of performance theory to demarcate a market creation strategy tailored for this demandside challenge. The strategy is based on catalyzing an initial community of practice centered on the new product form. Management frameworks for both content and process dimensions of a market creation strategy are developed; they include a "market creation mix" and a "performance innovation process," respectively.

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