Convergent innovation for sustainable economic growth and affordable universal health care: innovating the way we innovate.

This paper introduces convergent innovation (CI) as a form of meta-innovation-an innovation in the way we innovate. CI integrates human and economic development outcomes, through behavioral and ecosystem transformation at scale, for sustainable prosperity and affordable universal health care within a whole-of-society paradigm. To this end, CI combines technological and social innovation (including organizational, social process, financial, and institutional), with a special focus on the most underserved populations. CI takes a modular approach that convenes around roadmaps for real world change-a portfolio of loosely coupled complementary partners from the business community, civil society, and the public sector. Roadmaps serve as collaborative platforms for focused, achievable, and time-bound projects to provide scalable, sustainable, and resilient solutions to complex challenges, with benefits both to participating partners and to society. In this paper, we first briefly review the literature on technological innovation that sets the foundations of CI and motivates its feasibility. We then describe CI, its building blocks, and enabling conditions for deployment and scaling up, illustrating its operational forms through examples of existing CI-sensitive innovation.

Assessing poverty-alleviation outcomes of an enterprise-led approach to sanitation.

Inadequate sanitation negatively affects the lives of billions of people in the base of the pyramid (BoP) in the developing world, and has a particularly substantial impact on the well-being of millions of young children. Given the magnitude of the challenge and the limitations of existing approaches, enterprise-led approaches to providing public goods are generating growing interest. Emphasizing convergent innovation, enterprises targeting the BoP are presented as potentially sustainable and scalable interventions that generate positive poverty-alleviation effects. Yet our understanding of who is affected, and how, remains limited. To begin to address this gap, we apply a multidimensional framework to an urban-based, sanitation-oriented BoP enterprise, focusing on its poverty-alleviation effects on young children. Our analysis indicates that the enterprise's effects include changes in capability, economic, and relationship well-being and that these changes can be positive or negative. We also find that the impact varies depending on the role of the stakeholder in the business model and the age of the child. Our results contribute to a better understanding of how to assess the effectiveness of a sanitation intervention and how to evaluate the poverty-alleviation implications of an enterprise-led approach.

Using the base-of-the-pyramid perspective to catalyze interdependence-based collaborations.

Improving food security and nutrition in the developing world remains among society's most intractable challenges and continues despite a wide variety of investments. Both donor- and enterprise-led initiatives, for example, have explored including smallholder farmers in their value chains. However, these efforts have had only modest success, partly because the private and development sectors prefer to maintain their independence. Research from the base-of-the-pyramid domain offers new insights into how collaborative interdependence between sectors can enhance the connection between profits and the alleviation of poverty. In this article, we identify the strengths and weaknesses of donor-led and enterprise-led value chain initiatives. We then explore how insights from the base-of-the-pyramid domain yield a set of interdependence-based collaboration strategies that can achieve more sustainable and scalable outcomes.