Market Creation through Community Engagement: Combining Ethnographic and Business Thinking to Bridge Life‐Changing Technologies to Emerging Economies

Abstract

Emerging technologies such as drones, sensors, mesh networks and IoT have significant potential to bring new life‐changing services and benefits to places where infrastructure and ICT access is still limited. Nevertheless, many companies have already failed in the attempt to bring new solutions to the underserved population in emerging markets due to gaps in understanding capability and lack of systemic approach.ICT interventions are often market creation scenarios that require completely new behaviors for adoption (Simanis et al, 2010). The creation of these behaviors, from introduction, to sense‐making and usage, can benefit from deep ethnographic analysis not only to assess people's capability (Sen, 1985), met and unmet user needs (Martin et al., 2006) and product requirements, but also to frame the best service design strategy including critical elements such as distribution channels, business model and maintenance processes. The tools and methods that purely belong to ethnographic research (Beyer, Holtzblatt, 1998) need to embrace the business and strategy dimension, combining the two approaches to outline a successful implementation path.ICT interventions are also systemic, grounded in a multiplicity of existing roles and group dynamics that participate to the implementation and delivery of the new product or service (Kirsch, Bildner, Walker, 2016). Therefore, in informal economies, targeting significant behavior and system changes requires a strong iterative work with the local communities, as primary partner in defining and adopting the final solution (Simanis et al., 2008). The engagement of the community becomes central, turning the whole design and strategy process into a continuous dialogue between the experts and the local residents.The purpose of this paper is to describe a combined design ethnography and business strategy approach towards a more efficient design of emerging technology interventions in informal economies. The “For us by us” model –built upon the BoP 2.0 framework (Simanis et al., 2008) and tailored ethnographic and co‐creation techniques (Sanders, Stappers, 2007) – is a chance for practitioners and organisations who are investigating potential technology‐based interventions to quickly evaluate, prioritize and develop products and services that add value to people's lives, and have an increased probability of successful adoption.