 Hi. So I've been in this space 25 years and by this space I mean thinking about the role of business and addressing social issues. I started in Malawi in 1989 and I've continued on that career for a number of years and what I'll say right now which I think is really important for us to understand is we are at an inflection point. If you come to an event like Socap, what is here is amazing. The amount of energy, interest, resources has grown incredibly but we haven't really delivered on the promise. I mean what we really need is sustainability at scale. When I think the work I do, the term we use is base of the pyramid and we're talking about four or five billion people living in low-income markets in the developing world. To serve that number we need scale and I'm a business professor and I run an initiative at the Davidson Institute around the role of business and what we need to do is figure out what types of business solutions can we build at scale and there's some logic for this and the point of this talk is really thinking about not should we do it but how can we do it better and the background behind this is that there's a real logic for business and social to come together. From a business side there's always this idea of we need to search for growth, we need to find new customers, we need new sources of supply, we need to create value and if you think about it the social side has very much a complementary set right instead of searching for growth they need scale. Their challenge is they have too many customers right maybe four or five billion now is that number going to go up or down? Of course it's going to go up in the future there's going to be more and more people and born into this world until we reach around nine or ten billion of which you know if we're sort of estimating around six or seven will be in what we'll call the base of the pyramid. They need to support local producers and one way of thinking of creating value is alleviating poverty so in some respects there's some real logic as most of us know in these sectors collaborating and the promise is that we can generate business value while also alleviating poverty. I think that's what we all hope we can achieve. The challenge we need to create enterprises that are sustainable at scale and the work we do and what we want to do with with this broader community is say look we need to look back to think about the future. What we have generally events like this and wherever I go is people talking about how great they've done and where they're going. What we haven't done is reflected on the lessons we've learned. What I'm going to argue and I've put out in a new book is really how do we fulfill this promise and the idea here is we actually know more than we think. There are a set of tools and frameworks that we can use to help increase the likelihood of success of enterprises and it's you know we've been at this as I said I've been at this 25 years this idea of base of the pyramid has been around you know 15 or so years you know it's real interest and impact investing six seven eight years maybe a little more. It's time for us to look back and say what's working what's not working so that that was the goal of the book and what I want to talk about today is something that I think is is really important is how do we think about partnerships and we hear this term across sector collaboration but what does this really mean and I guess I'll jump they had but again there's a set of tools and again the one I want to talk about is partnerships but there are set of tools I'm thinking about designing scaling understanding value creation but I do want to talk about partnerships and there's a logic for this right if you think about it from a development community perspective and an enterprise perspective I don't know if you guys are familiar with the term floor and ceiling but a floor is the idea is at a minimum what will happen at a very minimum and the ceiling is what could happen as you look out how much could it grow so then the floor is sort of what's the baseline the ceiling is how high could it grow and you think about development community and and business investments they actually match up pretty well development community they have a high floor they say they're going to do something by gosh they're going to do it the challenge often is they're only going to do it for a fixed amount of money for a fixed amount of time so in sense sense some sense this the ceiling is relatively low we know what they're going to do business on the other hand is sort of the exact opposite right they may not do anything so their floor is very low but if they do do something the ceiling can be really high and it gives you a logic to say there is logic for partnership here right development community can help make things happen the business community can really take it to scale so there's a logic behind all this idea of cross-sector partnership that makes pretty good sense but the challenge is I don't think we've gone about it right right and this has been the historical question who should we partner with that seems like a good question right we hear a lot of people asking that it's not a bad question but it's not the right question the right question is how can we create a partnership ecosystem we need to think much more robust robustly about who we want to partner and how that partnership ecosystem is going to evolve over time so you know just from the perspective of enterprises we've worked with quite a lot and I'll use the term scaling facilitator in this work but enterprises or partners that are interested in scaling so I'm out there I'm thinking about this right there's actually a huge very confusing set of potential partners out there we've got different types we've got impact investors we've got incubators we've got challenge funds and then guess what each one of them actually does something different right you begin to think about it they all sound a little bit the same but as you're trying to sort as an enterprise to an assort this out you go how do I really figure out what the right set of partners is for me right how do I put together the right portfolio of partners so what we have tried to do is to build a framework to help managers think about this the enterprise leaders think about this as we go about how do you build the right partnership ecosystem and I'm a strategy guys so when you're in strategy you end up trying to create you know often two by twos trying to simplify the world in a way that that you create a framework that's relatively standard meaning a lot of enterprises can use it but then it can be specific to different enterprises they can use it in some different ways and and you try and create a minimum number of dimensions and the two dimensions that I think are really important one is if you're running an enterprise you need to think about support you need for your enterprise how do you actually run this enterprise you know and in base of the pyramid or inclusive business or whatever term we want to use we also have to think about how do we build the markets around the enterprises and I don't think that we're going to be successful building enterprises if we don't build the markets around those enterprises and then the other thing to think about is we need to get support to enable us to do things to actually execute in the field and we need support to build capacity and this begins to give a layout of what a framework can be for enterprises and we've done this in the field with quite a lot of enterprises mainly in Africa right now kind of helping them lay out say what does a partnership ecosystem really look like where am I strong where do I need partners where are the big gaps where I don't have any partners yet and how am I going to go about doing it because again we talk about the ecosystem how do you actually execute if you're running an enterprise and what you see unfortunately too often I don't have a pointer here but if you look in the in the lower left hand box most people motivate very quickly to financial capital if we just got the money that would be it that's just not true there is so much more that enterprises need if it was just about money it wouldn't be a big challenge right there's many other things that are missing last mile distribution market awareness market intelligence maybe the the the business environment how do we make all those things happen and this is why building enterprises and what we call base of the pyramid markets is so challenging is it requires thinking about partnerships differently and it requires enterprise leaders to think more robustly about how they go about partnering and this has a lot of challenges for enterprise in terms of control because when you partner you give up a little bit of control right but this is how we're going to make it happen and this is the work we're doing is really thinking more about now how do you begin to prioritize and if you're in the development community you flip this around and say if I want to facilitate enterprises how do I make sure that there's the right ecosystem of partners out there for them so you can turn around look at this and say okay what the finance is there that's not the big problem what are the other things they need that are going to prevent them from being successful so again it becomes a tool for both ways for both sectors so you know some of you may have seen this quote but I think we we tend to forget it but if you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far go together it's harder but to me that is at one of the actual crucial cornerstones of building enterprises and base of the pyramid markets and certainly you know there are now ways to begin to think about doing this more robustly we're not at you know we're not back ten years ago where well we don't know anything you know we have to go out we actually know we've had a chance to learn from both our successes and our failures to really begin to think about how to do that better and then I'll put this last bit out that one of the things we think a lot about now is how do you execute so I think that enterprises need something like a chief ecosystem director someone whose job now if it's a small company may not be able to focus exclusively on it but someone whose job it is is to really really think about building the ecosystem from the enterprise otherwise it just doesn't happen it has to be a top strategic priority and they can begin to understand these if you will these strange bedfellows what do they really want how do we operate with them how do we facilitate that boundary spanning how do we think about this this sort of subsidized support that we might need how what strings come with that and how do we manage all of that in a successful way so you're coming back to the beginning you know we now know enough that we can we've learned from our mistakes we can actually have a toolkit that allows to think about how do you build enterprises better and I think this is a way forward for us is not just thinking about the next deal but also thinking about the domain and where the future where what has gotten us where we are and with that I do think we can fulfill the base of the pyramid promise thank you