The “Enterprise Creation” process is intended for a firm that is materially involved in launching a BoP venture designed in collaboration with the local BoP community*. The process assumes that the plan has received broad community endorsement and that a set of metrics has been co-created for monitoring and evaluating the venture’s performance. Organizationally, this phase requires the prior establishment of a number of structures, including:
- a Core Team comprised of a multi-disciplinary MNC Team, local partners representative of the community’s diversity, and other key resource-holders
- a formalized network of partners whose resources and capabilities will be called upon in supporting the venture
- a local “enterprise office” that is open and accessible to the local community
- a mechanism that cultivates ongoing community input into the venture’s performance
- an organizational link from the MNC Team to the corporate structure that captures and shares learning and knowledge
Due to the complexity and uncertainty of the local environment, the transition from start-up to going concern is best understood as a learning process that incrementally expands and formalizes structures through a series of small-scale, iterative interventions. As such, the sub-processes that comprise the “Enterprise Creation” phase should be viewed as highly interdependent and non-linear in nature. Organizational controls should be configured in a manner that recognizes this environmental uncertainty and encourages an iterative learning approach.
The following sections are summaries of each of the three sub-processes in Enterprise Creation.
*An alternative to a firm’s material involvement in the creation of a BOP venture is for the firm to use a venture capital (VC) approach. To do so, the firm would establish a multi-expertise “VC team” in charge of investing in BOP projects. The task of the team would be to provide seed money to individuals (e.g., sustainable social entrepreneurs, employees within the MNC wanting to establish their own businesses) and/or existing ventures (e.g., small and medium enterprises operating at the BoP, BoP-based non-governmental organizations, incubators at local universities).