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The access to high quality, a reliable and affordable basic healthcare service is one of the key challenges facing the rural and semi‐urban population lying at base of the pyramid (BoP) in India. Realizing this as a social challenge and an economic opportunity (shared value), there has been an emergence of healthcare service providers who have bundled entrepreneurial attitude and passion with available scarce resources to design and implement cost‐effective, reliable and scalable market solutions for the BoP. The purpose of this research paper is to understand the underlying operating principles of these self‐sustainable business models aimed at providing healthcare services to the BoP segment in India.

The empirical context involves the use of case study research methodology, where the source of data is published case studies and the company websites of four healthcare organizations who have made a socio‐economic difference in the lives of the rural and semi‐urban population lying at the BoP in India.

The analysis and findings reflect the key operating principles for sustainable healthcare business ventures at the BoP. These include focus on 4A's (accessible, affordable, acceptable and awareness), local engagement, local skills building, learning by experiment, flexible organizational structure, dynamic leadership, technology integration and scalability.

This research study has focused mainly on the published case studies as source of data.

The intent is to understand and bring forth the learning and guiding principles, which act as a catalyst for the future researchers and business ventures engaged in BoP context.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework that expands business model innovation literature by including a social goal, the emerging markets (EMs) environmental characteristics and adopting a bottom-up perspective.

This paper draws on a single-case study. Sistema Ser/CEGIN (SER–CEGIN) is an Argentine social business that offers high-quality medical healthcare to BOP users.

The paper presents a new conceptualization on business model innovation that includes three dimensions: firm-centric, environment and customer-centric. The framework incorporates to the traditional framework on business model innovation, the social profit equation, the general and task environment and the end-user, as well as the dynamics between them.

While the authors acknowledge the importance of studying the components of the business model operating levels (economic, operational and strategic) to determine the type of business model innovation (revenue, enterprise and industrial), the framework incoporates the environment and customer-centric dimension. The suggested framework opens new streams of research both for the innovation business model literature as well as for the EMs – bottom of the pyramid (BOP) literature.

To achieve economic and social goals, particularly in the BOP, firms need to adopt a bottom-up approach to understand the components of their business model that need to be modified.

The paper proposes a novel business model innovation conceptualization which is useful for both researches to better study business models in the BOP and for firms to successfully operate in the BOP.

The study aims to present a systematic literature review (SLR) to understand the current status of research on social media usage among the bottom of the pyramid (BOP). The purpose of this study is to identify the research gaps in this domain and review future research agendas by using theory, context, characteristics and methods [TCCM] framework.

An SLR, keywords co-occurrence and TCCM analysis were used to analyse and synthesize insights from 44 studies gained from Web of Science and Scopus databases.

The findings suggest that the USA and India are popular contexts for studying BOP. The BOP population uses social media to gain utilitarian, hedonic and social values. Further, social media can help BOP explore “entrepreneurship” opportunities, value co-creation and bring innovations.

This study expands the intellectual boundaries of social media at BOP and suggests multidisciplinary research. Additionally, adopting novel theoretical lenses helped determine social media's impact on BOP.

Maternal mortality is an acute problem for many countries around the world, particularly those at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP). Most remote locations in these underdeveloped nations, for instance, in Africa, have to cope with the problem of interrupted electricity supply making healthcare practitioners often experience a helpless compulsion to compromise in providing quality medical attention, especially during childbirth. Along with many public, private and nongovernment initiatives, WE CARE Solar (hereafter WCS) – a social innovation venture comes with an idea of developing portable solar suitcases to respond to this intransigent problem.

This paper introduces a social enterprise that established its operation in Africa and so far has served in more than 30 similarly impoverished economies. Data was collected, analyzed using documentary research method. The authors have also collected and correlated the statements from the founder of WCS to complement the authors’ findings. With this paper, the authors intend to establish the type of innovation tools that are needed to provide value with a social innovation initiative in the health sector in the least developed country perspective. To facilitate better social outcomes and to ensure greater good, innovation requires to be accompanied by stakeholders’ involvement.

The findings indicate that WE CARE Solar has a positive social contribution toward ensuring safe motherhood and childbirth in underdeveloped countries by providing access to reliable solar power sources. The six-step social innovation process can be adopted by other social ventures to propose innovative solutions to social needs. Analyzing WCS's service delivery from the perspective of the 4As framework and value co-creation model, it is suggested that sustainable social change can be established with value co-creation through community engagement with multiple stakeholders.

This research was solely focused on one organization alone. Future research could look into the model to ascertain its acceptability in similar social innovation in healthcare initiatives.

This paper attempts to address a gap in social innovation in healthcare and its adaptability using the 4As framework with the value co-creation model. The authors propose this model from the data accumulated throughout the research, which could also serve to assist organizations looking for scalable and sustainable change.

Indian healthcare system, especially in rural regions, faces several problems that prevent it from achieving universal and sustainable healthcare coverage. The purpose of this paper is to capture such problems through expert opinions and provide solution concepts that are derived from other similar scenarios.

Delphi study has been conducted with 38 experts from diverse areas related to the Indian healthcare sector. Nineteen theses were formulated based on the discussion with experts and were reconfirmed through intensive desktop research. Finally, theses were subjected to expert panel member’s evaluation.

The pool of arguments provided by the participating experts included 415 written statements explaining the (dis-)agreement with the theses. The experts achieved consensus in six theses with interquartile ranges smaller or equal to 20. The written arguments provided by experts were summarized into five different categories, namely interrelations/dependencies in healthcare, inequalities in healthcare, lack of proactive measures, importance of healthcare personnel and role of government in healthcare. Finally, a framework is proposed mapping the issues identified at different stages of the healthcare value chain. Problem-based cost allocation and hub-and-spoke model are discussed as potential solutions for the issues identified.

Lack of empirical and statistical data on the effective cost arising from the present issues suggests future research to determine these expenses and therefore examine the feasibility of applying the problem-based cost allocation framework discussed in this study.

Results show that merely targeting the supply side of healthcare falls short of the mark, especially in a country, such as India, with large socio-economic differentials. Healthcare system, hence, should be viewed from a market perspective, taking both forces of supply and demand into consideration.

This study intends to allow for a comprehensive approach to identify the issues in Indian healthcare system by reviewing the existing key studies in literature and validating it through empirical inputs from experts in the domain. Based on the validation, a framework is proposed mapping the issues identified at different stages of the healthcare value chain.

The context of marketing and service research is rapidly changing as a result of advances in academic research and business practice. This has implications for our understanding of customer value. The purpose of this paper is to provide an update on customer value given today’s context (including recent advances such as technologies, human contact, collaborative consumption, service ecosystems and transformative service research); to revise Holbrook’s value typology; and to propose a research agenda.

This paper uses a conceptual approach that is rooted in the service and marketing literature.

The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, this paper presents an evolved view on customer value which accounts for recent advances in academic research and business practice. Second, this paper updates Holbrook’s value typology by revising existing value types as well as identifying additional value types; and offers guidelines for measuring and modeling customer value. Third, this paper proposes a research agenda to guide and stimulate future value research.

This paper provides an update on customer value, which is one of the most fundamental concepts in service and marketing research. This updated perspective has been approved and applauded by Morris B. Holbrook, one of the founding fathers of value research.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an improvised sustainable health-care model by integrating best practices, innovations and new dimensions to the present public health-care system – National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) – for improving the health status of the bottom of pyramid (BoP) in India.

The contribution of NRHM in ensuring the availability of health-care services and improving health indicators has been assessed. Some unique proven models of excellent health-care services and innovations have also been considered in designing an improvised health-care model. The empirical context takes the use of case study research methodology. The data have been extracted from various relevant papers, reports and websites.

Despite substantial augmentation in health infrastructure and human resources, increased local engagement and technology integration, the progress in health indicators during the NRHM has not been fairly better than that before. The present paper provides an improvised model that integrates all the potential stakeholders such as Government, Private health-care services providers, pharmaceutical and insurance companies and BoP community itself to ensuring 5As rather than 4As (Prahalad, 2004) in rural health care.

This study has relied mainly upon the secondary sources of data and some published case studies. The model is a hypothetical framework designed exclusively for rural setups of India.

The study shows the ways and invites all the stakeholders to come forward and build hybrid partnerships not only to develop society but also to develop sustainable BoP markets and earn profits.

The paper brings forth the aspects of achievements and limitations of NRHM in improving BoP health status, and it develops an improvised model to achieve the BoP-health objectives.

Manufacturers find bottom of the pyramid (BOP) markets challenging to serve due to low margins and highly localized needs. As such, residents in BOP markets often go without products commonly available in developed countries. Going without medical equipment may negatively affect healthcare services. This study develops a supply chain design strategy that supports the production of medical equipment by preserving variety flexibility at low volumes that stands to create new market opportunities for manufacturers and improve healthcare for residents in BOP markets.

The authors introduce a mass-customization model called options-based planning (OBP) which offers a framework to both leverage the efficiencies of high volume production models and provide products that are customized to local market needs. An empirical simulation, grounded in data collected from a large international manufacturer of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment, illustrates how an OBP production strategy will likely perform under BOP conditions and facilitate the delivery of healthcare equipment to BOP markets.

OBP provides a means for manufacturers to provide the customization necessary to serve fragmented BOP markets, while enabling higher production volume to make serving these markets more feasible. The empirical simulation reveals the relative benefits of OBP under conditions of forecast uncertainty, product complexity (number of design parameters) and different levels of responsiveness.

Increased access to modern medical equipment should improve healthcare outcomes for consumers in BOP markets.

The MRI context in BOP markets serves to illustrate the value of the OBP model for manufacturers.

Social health insurance framework of any country is the national identifier of the country’s policy for taking care of its population which cannot access or afford quality healthcare. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the strategic imperatives of digital technology for the inclusive social health models for the BoP customers.

A qualitative exploratory study using in-depth personal interviews with 53 Indian health insurance CXOs was conducted with a semi-structured questionnaire. Using MaxQDA software, the interview transcripts were analyzed by means of thematic content analysis technique and patterns identified based on the expert opinions.

A framework for the strategic imperatives of digital technology in social health insurance emerged from the study highlighting three key themes for technology implementation in the social health insurance sector – analytics for risk management, cost optimization for operations and enhancement of customer experience. The study results provide key insights about how insurers can enhance the coverage of BoP population by leveraging technology.

The framework would help health insurers and policymakers to select strategic choices related to technology that would enable creation of inclusive health insurance models for BoP customers.

The absence of specific studies highlighting the strategic digital imperatives in social health insurance creates a unique value proposition for this framework which can help health insurers in developing a convergence in their risk management and customer delight objectives and assist the government in the formulation of a sustainable social health insurance framework.