Back in 2007, I got intrigued by the R&D director of FrieslandCampina. “We like to impact undernourished children in Vietnam with our dairy products, but we can’t get it down to a level that they can afford”. It was a classical example of how corporates started to respond to the call from Muhamed Yunus, one of my biggest inspirators.

Yunus made clear that the bottom half of the world population is neglected by large corporates, while in fact the 4 billion people could be a huge business opportunity. What if you would re-think your business models, your products and services, and could target millions of potential customers and producers with meaningful products & services? It would be foolish to neglect the poor!

Most corporates started to approach this by creating cheaper spin-offs of their Western products, or by offering it in smaller packaging units. However, this results in a double penalty for the poor: they get poorer products, paying a higher price per volume. This is where the power of Human-Centered Design came into play.

We started to support corporates, NGOs and social ventures in first getting a deep understanding of low-income customers, as starting point for generating ideas for products and services following the research insights we got from the field. Human-centered design is therefore a success factor to design a good fit with what people need, aspire and can afford. It also opens up the space to design new business models that includes communities as employees, agents, processors and suppliers