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A Systematic Review of the Bottom/Base of the Pyramid Literature: Cumulative Evidence and Future Directions

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Abstract

Sixteen years ago, Prahalad and Hart (Strategy + Business 26:2–14, 2002) introduced the possibility of both profitably serving the poor and alleviating poverty. This first iteration of the Bottom/Base of the Pyramid approach (known as BoP 1.0) focused on selling to the poor. In 2008, after ethical criticisms leveled at it, the field moved to BoP 2.0, instead emphasizing business co-venturing. Since 2015, we have witnessed some calls for a new iteration (BoP 3.0), with the focus broadening to a more sustainable development approach to poverty alleviation. In this paper, we seek to answer the question: How has the BoP approach evolved over the past 16 years, and has it delivered on its early promise? We conducted a systematic review of 276 papers published in journals in this period, utilizing a rigorous correspondence analysis method to map key trends, and then further examined the 22 empirical studies conducted on the BoP approach. Our results suggest that the field has evolved, passing through a number of trends and coming full circle—with our analysis pointing to more recent BoP literature emphasizing similar themes to those espoused in the initial BoP iteration (i.e., treating the BoP as consumers), rather than reflecting the principles espoused in either BoP 2.0 or BoP 3.0. Our analysis also points to a lack of clear evidence that the BoP concept has delivered on its promise either to businesses (that they can serve BoP markets profitably) or to BoP participants (that involvement by multinational corporations will help alleviate poverty).

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Notes

  1. For additional results including more detailed tables and descriptions, please see the Supplementary Materials available at the journal website.

  2. To ensure that our results were not influenced by the publication of special issues, we ran the procedure after eliminating 41 studies published in nine special issues over the 15 years. The special issues were spread across the 6-year categories with two special issues each in three periods and one special issue each in the remaining three periods. The patterns of associations reported here remained the same, confirming that the timing and nature of special issues on this topic did not affect the conclusions drawn here. Additional details including revised plots are available from the authors upon request.

  3. In our review, we did not see a clear attempt to differentiate value creation (the pie size) and value appropriation (share/slice of this pie) as performance of the BoP venture is used as an indicator for both; “value” is often defined only from the firm’s perspective.

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Dembek, K., Sivasubramaniam, N. & Chmielewski, D.A. A Systematic Review of the Bottom/Base of the Pyramid Literature: Cumulative Evidence and Future Directions. J Bus Ethics 165, 365–382 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04105-y

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