Scaling Impact: Template Development and Replication at the Base of the Pyramid

In recent years, management scholars and practitioners have been advocating a more prominent role for business in economic and social development at the “Base of the Pyramid” (BoP) where more than a billion people subsist on less than two dollars a day. Yet, in both theory and practice, the development of financially sustainable and scalable business solutions for the BoP has been challenging. By integrating insights from the emerging BoP literature with extant research on the replication of organizational routines and templates, this study examines how the distinctive conditions of the BoP affect the development and replication of scalable business solutions for the world’s poor. In particular, we identify key distinctive conditions of the BoP and develop an organizing framework on the mechanisms that facilitate the development and replication of viable and scalable business templates there. Our analysis contributes to BoP research by advancing understanding of the role of templates in economic and social development at the BoP as well as to research on the replication of organizational routines and templates by delineating the distinctive conditions and mechanisms that affect the development and replication of templates at the BoP.