Business Insight Zone

This Newsweek piece* details Mark Bent’s creation and marketing of the solar-powered BoGo light. “BoGo” stands for “buy one, give one”; as the article explains, “Bent’s light, sold only via the Internet, comes with a special deal: buy one for $25, plus shipping, and Bent automatically gives one to the relief group of your choice or to U.S. troops in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

Citizens of the industrialized world take for granted the availability of bright lights at night. If you want to stay up reading in bed past midnight, no problem. If you want to run a third shift in your company’s production plant, no problem — just leave the lights on. But in many parts of the world, nightfall brings any reading or schooling to an end, and spells the close of productive work for the day.

American entrepreneurs looking to enhance social goods while making their own fortunes from customers at “the bottom of the pyramid” face unusual challenges, as the article explains:

It’s a tough business, though. Mills says Bent isn’t the only one trying to figure out how to make the lights affordable for people in developing countries and how to ship them to regions with a low population density. Bent says he has distributed roughly 20,000 BoGo Lights so far from his Houston headquarters, including 7,500 that were bought by ExxonMobil for refugees at U.N. camps in Africa. [...]

Still, Bent says his company has yet to reach the break-even point, despite his having sunk $250,000 of his own savings into it. “No one has done this before,” he says of his business model. “If I had a pizza parlor and was screwing up, I could walk down the street and ask what’s wrong with the sauce. But here, I can’t get any guidance from other people.”

While I still think that appropriately targeted aid programs are vital to development efforts — especially new-look programs like those of the Gates Foundation — in the long run, successful entrepreneurship for (and among) the developing world will play a vital role in improving prosperity there.

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* Pointed out to me by my mother — thanks, Mom!