Responsible Management Education and the Challenge of Poverty

A Teaching Perspective

Carole Parks, Al Rosenbloom, Milenko Gudić

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783532575
• eBook ISBN: 9781351285421
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

"End poverty in all its forms everywhere" – UN Sustainable Development Goal 1There has never been a more urgent need to tackle the issue of global poverty, and the need for businesses, business schools and management programmes to address the issue is crucial as they educate and employ the leaders of tomorrow.But with so many competing priorities on courses and considerable ground to cover, it can be challenge to devote enough time and attention to poverty issues.Responsible Management Education and the Challenge of Poverty provides an invaluable guide for management educators who want to inspire a new generation of leaders to tackle global poverty challenges. This expert collection shows educators how to teach poverty in management programmes, with examples, encouragement and guidance from course leaders and management academics.The five sections of the book focus on frameworks for understanding, course design and topic integration within courses, extra-curricular approaches or community-based approaches, contemporary issues and future directions.The book is a companion volume to Socially Responsive Organizations and the Challenge of Poverty, which shows a clear rationale for the inclusion of poverty in management education.Showcasing innovative teaching, module development and program design methods that integrate the issue of poverty into global business management courses and curricula, this handbook shows educators how to design effective programmes and modules that get to the heart of poverty issues as they relate to management education. It is essential reading for faculty members, trainers and administrators who are interested in new ways to engage students with the complex relationship between poverty and business practice.

Section II
Course design and topic integration within courses

5
Teaching about the base of the pyramid

Bringing students to the intersection of business and poverty alleviation

Ted London¹

William Davidson Institute and Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, USA

This chapter presents a holistic set of approaches for teaching at the intersection of business and poverty alleviation. In particular, it addresses a critical challenge faced by many educators in this domain: how does one effectively introduce the base of the pyramid (BoP) and the context of impoverishment to a class of students studying in the developed world? These students need sufficient contextual background to productively contribute to a mutual learning environment. Based on more than a decade of experience teaching in this domain, I offer a set of learnings and best practices that other educators may wish to implement in their classrooms. These classroom-based recommendations are complemented with immersion activities that can further enhance student experiences. Yet, even with a thoughtfully crafted portfolio of educational experiences, students and the faculty guiding them must retain a sense of humility and recognize there is much to learn from the BoP.

An integrative approach

The main contributions of this chapter are to:

• Offer insight on what can work for instructors seeking to bring the context of constrained resources and impoverishment found in base-of-the-pyramid (BoP) markets to students who are geographically or otherwise distant from this type of market environment
• Provide some specific examples of best practices that these educators can use in their classrooms and beyond

An additional contribution is to catalyse further discussions on other approaches for enhancing teaching in this emerging domain. This is the author’s personal journey. The personal lessons learned and recommendations stem directly from his various experiences.

Education, particularly within business schools, has almost exclusively focused on relatively resource-rich societies and markets in the developed world. Yet, there is much for students to learn from the challenging context of poverty and the opportunity to use market-based solutions to confront some of the major social challenges of the 21st century (Gordon, 2008; Rosile, 2008). Business development and poverty alleviation are usually considered in isolation, both in practice and in the classroom. The perspective that addressing social issues is detrimental to business success, however, is changing. Growing interest in business approaches that serve the BoP, the 4 billion or more people in low-income markets in the developing world, is helping to transform this perception (Hammond et al., 2007; London, 2009; London et al., 2010; London and Hart, 2004; Prahalad and Hammond, 2002; Prahalad and Hart, 2002). This changing landscape offers both opportunities and challenges for those interested in teaching this topic.

For business educators, effectively exploring the intersection of business development and poverty alleviation requires helping students sitting in classrooms in such places as Ann Arbor, Michigan, Washington, DC, or London, UK to have a better understanding of the BoP context. Some of these students may have never left their home country. Even those who have travelled to the developing world may not have ventured far from large cities or major tourist destinations.

A new framing

In 2004, when the “Business Strategies for the Base of the Pyramid” course was first offered (in partnership with Professor Stuart Hart at the University of North Carolina), interest and research on the topic was emerging. Then the course’s main focus was on helping students understand the potential opportunity in BoP markets and providing some early examples of success and associated lessons learned. At that time, there was little, relevant pedagogical material available. The course primarily relied on cases that came from Hart’s teaching in the broader sustainability domain, together with descriptive reports, articles and other materials, to provide background on specific business initiatives. Complementing these existing teaching cases and other materials was this author’s and others’ initial research in the field. Two years later, Hart left for Cornell University² and the author moved to the University of Michigan, where he taught at the Ross School of Business in conjunction with an appointment at the William Davidson Institute.

Figure 1 Strategies for connecting students to the base of the pyramid

By this time, students were becoming increasingly knowledgeable about the BoP domain. Many had read the leading articles and books on the topic and were eager for a more in-depth classroom experience. The domain had begun to shift substantially from motivating students to consider business opportunities in BoP markets to exploring how best to operate enterprises in these markets. Consequently, both the approach and objectives for the course needed to change.

The new course objectives thus became (1) to provide a balanced view of the opportunities and complexities in aligning business-oriented incentives for growth, innovation, and profits with the development community’s efforts to create a more inclusive capitalism, and in doing so, (2) to explore the various challenges and tensions that emerge as business ventures seek to enter BoP markets. To do so involved developing tools and frameworks that venture leaders could use to address these challenges and tensions. Making all this come together for the students required exploring innovative approaches to bringing the BoP into the classroom to enable students to acquire a deeper appreciation of the context they were studying. During the next several years, a number of pedagogical approaches and tools were developed and implemented. Some worked well, some less so. Lessons learned about strategies that work best are summarized in Figure 1.

Development of a relevant case portfolio

A key first step to a richer curriculum was developing a targeted portfolio of cases and other teaching materials. These cases needed to enable exploration of critical topics—business model development, market entry strategies, strategies for scaling, non-traditional partnerships, subsidized support, market creation and mutual value creation—within a context of individuals and market environments characterized by constrained resources and capabilities. Furthermore, these teaching materials should not just seek to show that it can be done (i.e. inspirational), but rather they should offer opportunities for insight on how it could be done (i.e. instructional). With this in mind, cases showing failure or emphasizing unique tensions and challenges may be more useful than those trying to showcase success. This portfolio of cases should also capture diversity in organizational type, industry sector and geography.

The challenge faced back then was that this portfolio of teaching materials did not yet exist, and it was important to work out an effective and efficient way to develop the cases. Two strategies emerged as the way to proceed. The first was to focus on developing teaching materials about enterprises of which I had some know ledge, or better yet, with which there had been an existing relationship with the individuals who would become the protagonists in these cases. This made it much easier to access a robust amount of primary and secondary background data. It turned out that collaborating with the enterprises featured in the cases also added an extra dimension of excitement and enthusiasm, which made them more alive for the reader. Second, in nearly all the cases there was a co-author; often this was one of the students. This strategy is especially useful for educators with relatively limited resources or time.

Each case was developed with a specific set of teaching issues in mind. Yet it was not sufficient to focus on just developing one-off cases. There was a need to think strategically about the set of cases that would address the range of topics intended to be covered in the course. So each time a new case was considered, a key consideration was how it would add to the overall portfolio of materials (see the Appendix for a list of some favourite teaching cases and the key teaching points associated with each).³ The cases covered companies, non-profit organizations and development agencies operating in Africa, Asia and Latin America across a number of industries. Now that these and other cases exist, educators can feel more secure in knowing there is a robust set of teaching materials that addresses most, if not all, of their teaching needs.⁴ The advice to fellow teachers is to select carefully the cases based on the topics you want to teach, rather than the enterprises you want to highlight.

Bringing cases to life

Videos, pictures and “inside” information can enhance learning from the cases and further bring the BoP market context alive in the classroom. Video interviews with key protagonists can complement the material in the cases as well as open up new avenues for discussion. Seeing and hearing from these corporate and development sector leaders helps drive home the unique challenges of operating in this context. Pictures can also greatly add to the in-class conversation. While videos allow students to hear about the venture’s business model and the challenges its managers faced, pictures offer a different way to understand the enterprise’s activities and the environment in which it operates.

Since there was a direct personal link with most of enterprises featured in the cases used, it was possible and beneficial to share personal pictures, experiences, videos and the actual products developed by the ventures. Seeing the pictures and touching the products really does bring more of the context into the classroom. Reflecting on the personal experiences in working with these enterprises adds depth to discussions related to potentially “sensitive” matters such as internal and cross-organizational issues, tensions between business-development and poverty alleviation goals, and challenges in operating in unfamiliar contexts and collaborating with non-traditional partners. For educators without this level of direct contact, alternatives include reaching out to the enterprises featured in the cases to collect up-to-date information and seeing, perhaps, if someone from the leadership team would be willing to join the class session via Skype or similar technology. Pictures and videos may also be available on the web.

Videos that were filmed on location can be especially powerful. For example, the VisionSpring case has an accompanying video. In addition to reading about the venture’s business model, which uses a micro-franchising model to recruit local women to become Vision Entrepreneurs in order to address the widespread problem of presbyopia—a medical condition resulting in blurry up-close vision and the need for reading glasses—and the challenges its managers are facing, students can also see the Vision Entrepreneurs in action and get a better sense of the environment in which this enterprise operates. With the proliferation of videos on YouTube and similar sites, much more material of this type is now available on the web.

In addition, simulations offer a valuable tool when trying to expose the unique tensions found in this domain. Instructors can create their own or adopt existing approaches. With the involvement of several former students, a role-play was created that compared grant-based and market-based approaches to poverty alleviation through the distribution of bed nets to prevent mosquito-borne diseases, especially malaria.⁵ The information from advocates of the different approaches, including evidence that supports both positions, was collected and summarized. In the classroom, the students have to sift through ideologies and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section I: Frameworks for understanding
• Section II: Course design and topic integration within courses
• Section III: Extracurricular and community-based approaches
• Section IV: Contemporary issues
• Conclusion: Taking stock and moving towards the next steps
• About the editors
• About the contributors