Al Hammond is Senior Entrepreneur with Ashoka’s Full Economic Citizenship program, where he is leading an effort to transform rural healthcare. He is also: a serial social entrepreneur, with five prior start-ups to his credit, now working on a health care enterprise that will pilot in rural India; an author who has published extensively in the scientific, policy research, and business literature and written or edited more than 12 books or book-length reports, including, most recently, principal author of The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy for the Base of the Pyramid; a consultant who has worked with numerous corporations, foundations, government agencies (including the White House science office), and international organizations; a former journalist who went on to found and edit several national publications, win several national magazine awards, broadcast a nationally-syndicated daily radio program for 5 years, and oversee the launch of a prominent blog, Next Billion.
Rigid internal profit goals or lack of direct personal experience with BOP markets and their constraints are key to big companies’ ignorance to work with social entrepreneurs, writes Ashoka’s Al Hammond.
read more
