The foundation for this course lies with unique synergies between pioneering research, teaching, and social initiatives through the Subsistence Marketplaces Initiative. Unique to this approach is a bottom-up understanding of the intersection of poverty and the marketplace. The goals of this course are to help you develop an understanding of marketplace activity in the radically different context of subsistence where much of humanity resides and survives, and for you to design solutions that can be implemented by individuals, businesses, and social enterprises through economically, ecologically, and socially sustainable products for subsistence marketplaces.
Lesson 7-2.1 Designing Elements of Enterprise Plan – Case Study of Marketplace Literacy Project
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From the course by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Subsistence Marketplaces
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Crafting an Enterprise Plan
In this module you will learn about how to craft a detailed enterprise plan for sustainably delivering a solution in subsistence marketplace.
Meet the Instructors
Madhu ViswanathanDiane and Steven N. Miller Professor in Business
Department of Business Administration
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What is marketplace literacy?
Well, when you think about a poor person, and what he or she has
to do to participate in the marketplace,
there are three major elements that are needed.
Financial resources, access to markets to buy and to sell,
which is particularly relevant in rural settings, and marketplace literacy.
Marketplace literacy is not basic literacy but it's self-confidence, skills
and awareness of rights as a consumer and an entrepreneur.
Let's take an example and see what's unique about marketplace literacy.
Imagine a poor woman who needs to survive in some way.
She's learned how to cook growing up.
And so that's the vocation or trade that she knows.
So she decides to run a food shop to survive.
But to run the shop, she needs know-how.
She needs to know how to design menus,
to ensure raw material, and identify a good location.
But she also needs know-why, which is a deeper understanding of the marketplace.
For example, why should she be customer oriented?
Why not deliver to middle-class households?
Why not supply to restaurants? Or why be in the food business at all?
This kind of know-why is very important because it's the poor
with the least resources who have to keep adapting to changing circumstances.
So there are a number of levels of marketplace literacy.
There is the vocation or trade level.
There is know-how, how to design a product, how to communicate the benefits.
And there is know-why, which is a deeper undestanding of the marketplace.
Why choose an enterprise? Why strive to provide customer value?
The marketplace literacy approach begins with the
know-why as a basis for the know-how.
We use social skills irrespective
of literacy levels.
We use role plays, picture sorting, simulated shopping
in order to teach people to be better consumers.
And better entrepreneurs.
We started out for many years in providing a
face to face program with a number of different exercises.
We start out with general issues about the marketplace, such as what
an exchange is, and how exchanges add up to a value chain.
What the different types of needs
are, and so on.
Let me give you an example of a task that we use in marketplace literacy.
We show people images of a farmer producing some crops all the way through
to a customer consuming the end product, as well as a picture of money.
We ask people to place them in concentric circles so that whatever is
most important to run a business is at the center and so on.
What we found was that people often pasted the picture of currency in the middle.
Through discussion, they come to learn that it's the customer that's the most
important, and if you cannot serve a customer need, you don't have a business.
We provide exercises on marketplace literacy
in general, on consumer literacy, by
setting up shops and cheating people and show them how they got cheated.
And on entrepreneurial literacy as well.
We try to get people to understand how to gain value as a customer
in order for them then to understand how to deliver value as an entrepreneur.
Over time, we have tried to scale this particular model by
working with one of the
largest micro-financing organizations in the world.
They produced a movie as an emotional platform
that we used in order to create 14 video based modules without a teacher.
So the modules have a teacher on the screen, and we envision 20 women in
a room with somebody playing the DVD to run the exercises, to do group work.
To use the movie to learn about basic concepts.
And to then go out in the village and do
homework, which involves applying the concept to their own settings.
So what have we learned from this social initiative?
We've learned that there are four different
phases, at least, in developing a solution.
First of all, it's to identify a need that is not being served well.
Secondly, it's to design a solution.
In our case, it was a need for marketplace literacy and we designed education.
Thirdly, there needs to be a technology that can
be deployed to maximize reach or to scale our approach.
In our case, it has been a video based approach.
And finally, there needs to be an enterprise model.
In other words, we need to figure out why anybody would do
what we think they should do, or what we believe they should do.
What is the incentive for them to participate in the education in our case?
We've learned a number of intangibles from this social initiative.
For example, the most important thing is to find the right people.
To try to implement
the program.
This is perhaps, more important than having financial resources.
Having the best people, and a place to work in, is perhaps
more important and the resources will find a way to get there.
Implementation is everything.
Ideas are great but it's really about implementation.
It's really about making things work at the ground level.
That's why you need the people. It's very important to start small, and
fail small. And fail quickly if possible.
If you learn how to get to 20 people, you can then learn how to get
to 100 people, and then learn how to get to thousands of people, and then beyond.
And finally, it's very important to keep your promises.
If you're working in a village, the promise you
make is like making a promise in a fishbowl.
You have to make sure and, and promise what you can deliver.
Otherwise the word will get out, and very soon
you will lose trust as well.
So these are just some of the intangibles in running a social initiative.
Once again, it's relevant for you as you
think about your project in terms of the problem.
The opportunity, the solution, the
enterprise plan and the sustainable outcomes.
In our case,the problem was the lack of marketplace literacy
and our opportunity and our geography has been in southern India.
Our solution was the educational program which we augmented in a number of ways.
We also created an ecosystem by farming or re-activating self help groups of women.
Our enterprise plan is to take this value proposition to people and
essentially ask for their time in order for this education to happen.
We also believe that they immediately benefit as customers and have savings
right away whether they start an enterprise or not.
And our outcomes are social, environmental, and economic.
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