The highlight of the Networked World conference was the discussion of the “base of the pyramid,” the notion (which I discussed in a post here) that the poorest four billion people in the world represent the Next Great Market. The panel was the most high-powered of the day: C. K. Prahalad, NASDAQ’s Al Diamond, and Jim Moore, the head of Advanced Materials. There were several lessons from the session, and a couple unexpected things.

First, it’s clear that in order to succeed in this market, companies will need to rethink their metrics and strategies as profoundly as companies making the move into mass production and markets had to. (“What do you mean, we’ll make more money if we lower the price?”) High unit profits are out, as are conventional models of pricing.

Second, reading the base of the pyramid will require thinking of the poor differently: not as stupid or the losers in the Great Game of Globalization, but as people who often have demonstrated tremendous creativity in the face of tremendous obstacles and nonexistent opportunities. (The instinct to treat the poor as deserving, not of charity but their fate, is easy to come to when you believe you live in a meritocracy.) Prahalad made the case that we have to go from thinking of the poor as an intractable problem, to thinking of them as an opportunity, and finally to thinking of them as a source of innovation. (Not just as
innovators in products, or uses of products, but also in organizations. As an example of the last, consider the Nutan Tiffin Lunch Box Association. It moves 175,000 homemade lunches per day, picking them up from housewives, carrying them into Mumbai, then returning the boxes. It uses illiterate deliverymen who are taught to read a notation system written on the boxes, and has a near-perfect delivery record: “Better than Six Sigma,” Prahalad declared.)

Finally, multinationals have to do this because if they don’t, they can look forward to a generation of Indian and Chinese companies growing up in these markets, then moving into advanced nations. If you thought that the Japanese were tough, this reasoning goes, just wait until you’ve got competition from countries with billions of people. (Clayton Christensen has made precisely this argument, in fact.) This is a global competition version of the fear of ghetto superpredator, an updated, corporate multinational Yellow Peril story- though I don’t think Prahalad, or anyone else working in this space, intends it to sound quite that way.

Last Thursday I was at Santa Clara University for a conference on “Networked World: Information Technology and Globalization,” organized by the SCU Center for Science, Technology and Society. You might not think of a place like Santa Clara as the kind of place that would have a high-octane STS center, but it’s quietly becoming a powerhouse in the field. (Maybe the Center’s picked up some management lessons from the Jesuits?) They’re not going head-to-head against the likes of Stanford and Berkeley, but the strategy they’re following offers a couple useful lessons in academic entrepreneurship.

First, the center is virtual. That’s hardly a surprise these days, as most centers are; but it means that they’re putting fewer resources in brick-and-mortar kinds of things (faculty lines, buildings, etc.) and concentrating on building networks among extant faculty. (These efforts eventually can develop into some influence over new appointments, or at least the ability to nudge them one way or another.)

Second, they’re being very aggressive about involving people from across the University. STS programs at other big research universities, can get 90% of its people from one or two big departments (e.g., history, philosophy, maybe anthropology or sociology), and spend vitually no time on outreach to anyone else. (I was always perplexed when I was a postdoc at Berkeley, and living in the OHST program, at how many people there were at Berkeley with interests in the history of science had nothing to do with OHST.)

Third, and this is the really innovative thing, the Santa Clara center appears to have ties to the professional schools and outside community that are at least as close, or closer, as to the humanities. This is extremely unusual: some STS programs are leavened by the occasional cross-appointment with someone in engineering, or very rarely law, but Santa Clara really strikes me as focused more at the worlds of praxis than theoria. This means that they’re actually more likely to do the kinds of outreach-to-the-world things that every STS program says it wants to do, but few know how.

If they play their cards right, I think in a few years the Center could establish a niche in the discipline that gives it a lot of visibility, and a great deal of street cred. They’re never likely to have Bruno Latour come and speak; but they can already attract the likes of C. K. Prahalad. The rubber of STS is meeting the road in some interesting ways.

Sometimes you see an article that has it all: greed, junk science, a level of perversity with the facts that would make the former Iraqi information minister say, “Whoa.” The Guardian reports that the Sugar industry threatens to scupper WHO— saying it will lobby to cut WHO funding if they release a report saying that a diet with more than 10% sugar is bad for you.

The great thing is that the sugar industry is claiming that a diet of up to 25% sugar is safe. Already, Americans eat an average of half a pound of sugar a day, disguised in drinks, snacks, etc.. Maybe the Sugar Association thinks we’re underconsuming.