12/21/2004 by William Baue
(SocialFunds.com)
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Cornell and University of North Carolina Business Professor Stuart Hart’s Capitalism at the Crossroads perfectly complements University of
Michigan Business Professor C. K. Prahalad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, perhaps even surpassing
it in significance. The two professors collaborated from 1998 through 2002 on the seminal article
that gave birth to the “bottom of the pyramid” (BOP) concept that Prof. Prahalad explains so
eloquently in his book (see related book review). The BOP market
theory holds that multinational corporations (MNCs) can simultaneously profit and help
reduce global poverty by serving a market they have largely ignored until recently: the 4 billion
people in the world living on less than $2 a day.
This theory is all the buzz nowadays.