Sustainable Innovation for Subsistence Marketplaces

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

leadership-and-management   |   Advanced   |   19 Hours

This course focuses on understanding subsistence marketplaces and designing business solutions for the billions of people living in poverty in the global marketplace. To develop understanding of subsistence marketplaces, we use exercises to enable participants to view the world from the eyes of subsistence consumers and entrepreneurs, facilitate bottom‐up understanding generated by participants, and provide insights from extensive research. More broadly, the course uses the context of extreme resource constrained contexts to learn about the bottom-up approach pioneered through the Subsistence Marketplaces Initiative, and apply it in any context. The course will involve virtual immersion in subsistence contexts, emersion of unique insights, bottom-up design, innovation and enterprise. A parallel project will focus on understanding a specific need in a subsistence marketplace, and designing a solution and an enterprise plan.

Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to:
•\tDevelop an understanding of subsistence marketplaces
•\tDesign solutions for subsistence marketplaces
•\tDevelop enterprise plans to implement solutions for subsistence marketplaces
•\tApply the bottom-up approach for subsistence marketplaces as well as other contexts

This course is part of the iMBA offered by the University of Illinois, a flexible, fully-accredited online MBA at an incredibly competitive price. For more information, please see the Resource page in this course and onlinemba.illinois.edu.

What skills will you gain?

Planning

interview

value proposition

sustainability

project

Innovation

market (economics)

Sales

Entrepreneurship

top-down and bottom-up design