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This paper argues that corporate efforts to serve subsistence economies must be integrated rather than disparate. Focusing on the efforts of Unilever's Indian subsidiary, the paper draws out four key lessons for businesses in low-income regions – availability, branding, convergence, and development. Four Unilever case studies are used to demonstrate how Unilever built on existing strengths, integrating diverse interventions to create Shakti, a unique pro-poor business model. The paper then analyzes the impact of the business intervention on the poor, calling for a wider convergence and cooperation between the private and the development sectors.

To examine and measure the effectiveness of enterprise systems at business network level. The paper presents the best practice case highlighting how business network systems (BNS) can be redesigned using enterprise systems to strengthen relationships with business partners and to enhance value to consumers.

The paper examines the business potential of BNS redesign at the relationship level through a case study of one of the largest fast‐moving consumer goods (FMCG) networks, HLLNet.

HLLNet has uniquely extended its ERP system to establish transactional and relationship‐oriented BNS and has achieved significant improvement in business performance for all partners in the network. It has achieved significant reductions in inventory, improvements in cash management and a negative working capital due to improved information flows across the network and the implementation of policies such as vendor‐managed inventory (VMI). Simultaneously it has improved its telecoms infrastructure and redesigned its inter‐organizational processes to support these information flows. This paper examines how the adoption of enterprise systems across the network, along with a redesign of BNS, can improve and contribute significantly to value to end consumers.

The findings are quite useful to enterprises in terms of deploying enterprise systems across their value chain. They need not only to re‐engineer business processes, but also to innovate new business policies while deploying enterprise systems in order to create value out of IT investment.

The purpose of this paper is to detect different behavioral groups and the dominant patterns of customer shifts between segments of different values over time.

A new hybrid methodology is presented based on clustering techniques and mining top-k and distinguishing sequential rules. This methodology is implemented on the data of 14,772 subscribers of a mobile phone operator in Tehran, the capital of Iran. The main data include the call detail records and event detail records data that was acquired from the IT department of this operator.

Seven different behavioral groups of customer shifts were identified. These groups and the corresponding top-k rules represent the dominant patterns of customer behavior. The results also explain the relation of customer switching behavior and segment instability, which is an open problem.

The findings can be helpful to improve marketing strategies and decision making and for prediction purposes. The obtained rules are relatively easy to interpret and use; this can strengthen the practicality of results.

A new hybrid methodology is proposed that systematically extracts the dominant patterns of customer shifts. This paper also offers a new definition and framework for discovering distinguishing sequential rules. Comparing with Markov chain models, this study captures the customer switching behavior in different levels of value through interpretable sequential rules. This is the first study that uses sequential and distinguishing rules in this domain.

Since the onset of globalisation, many multinational corporations (MNCs) have been increasingly opening up subsidiaries in several host nations. While the entry of MNCs in some nations has been generally unproblematic, that has not been the case in every host nation. Fears of neocolonialism and postcolonial anxieties are very real phenomena in many parts of the world. When it comes to such resistant environments, MNCs need to be especially careful in how they conduct their public relations activities. This qualitative study of two MNC subsidiaries in India – Hindustan Lever Limited (of Unilever) and Maruti Udyog Limited (of Suzuki Motor Corporation) – explores, in context, the phenomenon of MNC public relations in this host nation that has a history of resistance to MNCs. The authors conclude that MNCs can be successful in potentially resistant host environments through culturally attuned involvement, intervention and respect for the local that is proven through socially responsible performance over time. This is an important message for MNCs starting up in new host environments. Descriptive details elucidate the specific public relations activities of the two MNCs in the Indian business and cultural environment. Overall, the findings have heuristic value for transnational public relations theory building since they suggest that an MNC’s organisational culture and approach to communication and relationship cultivation are important variables that shape how it practises public relations in host nations around the world.

This paper aims to clarify some aspects of the application of the Godunov method for the Baer–Nunziato equations solution on the example of the problem of shock wave – dense particles cloud interaction.

The statement of the problem corresponds to the natural experiment. Mathematical model is based on the Baer–Nunziato system of equations with algebraic right-hand side source terms that takes into account the interphase friction force. Two numerical approaches are used: Harten-Lax-van Leer method and Godunov method.

For the robust simulation using Godunov method, the application of the pressure relaxation procedure is proposed. The comparative analysis of the simulation results using two methods is carried out. The Godunov method provides significantly smaller numerical diffusion of the solid phase volume fraction in the cloud that leads to the much better agreement of the pressure curves on transducers and the dynamics of the cloud motion with the experimental data.

Godunov method for the Baer–Nunziato equations is applied for the simulation of the natural experiment on the shock wave particles cloud interaction. Up to now, the examples of the application of the Godunov method for the Baer–Nunziato equations to the investigation of the practical problems have been limited by the works of the authors of the method and the field of detonation in the heterogeneous explosives. For the robust simulations in the presence of interphase boundaries, it is proposed to use the Godunov method together with the pressure relaxation procedure.

The purposes of the study are to compare the investment behavior of farmers in Kazakhstan as a transforming country and in Germany as a Western industrialized country as well as to analyze whether the investment behavior of farmers is consistent with the normative benchmarks of the net present value approach or the real options (RO) approach.

The paper conducted an experiment with 100 Kazakhstani and 106 German farmers. The first part of the experiment describes an investment opportunity in an agricultural and in a non-agricultural treatment. The second part refers to a Holt and Laury lottery to determine farmers' risk attitude that could influence the investment behavior.

The results show that both approaches do not provide an exact prediction of the investment behavior of farmers. However, German farmers invest later than Kazakhstani farmers meaning that the investment behavior of German farmers is closer to the RO approach. This might imply that German farmers are more likely to take into account the value of flexibility when making investment decisions than Kazakhstani farmers.

Since investment behavior is country-specific, it is worth investigating whether farmers from other transforming countries would show different investment behavior compared to farmers from other Western industrialized countries. Furthermore, decision-making behavior related to investments could be different from that related to disinvestments. Therefore, it may be interesting to analyze the disinvestment decisions of farmers in transforming and Western industrialized countries.

The results show that it is not acceptable to apply the results of experiments investigating the investment behavior of entrepreneurs in a transforming country to entrepreneurs in a Western industrialized country and vice versa. Furthermore, training for farmers is needed because there is still room for improvement in order to achieve the RO benchmark. Finally, taking into account RO effects could improve the results of policy impact analysis.

This is the first experimental study comparing the investment behavior of farmers from a transforming country and from a Western industrialized country.

Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP); social innovation and business modeling.

Undergraduate and graduate level management/business school students. It can be taught in marketing management and entrepreneurship/innovation courses.

LifeSpring Hospitals Pvt. Ltd is an expanding chain of hospitals that provide high quality health care to lower-income women and children across Andhra Pradesh. It is a 50-50 equity partnership between Hindustan Latex Ltd and the Acumen Fund. LifeSpring has demonstrated exceptional management principles, some of them being the most innovative and attractive ones. The entire focus of LifeSpring is on one particular niche: maternal care. Some argue about its strategy of not adopting diversification, but LifeSpring has proved its point by actually turning out to be a profitable business. The strategy of focusing on one niche has led to reduction in cost in terms of specialized doctors and the range of equipment needed to serve. Adding to the strategic strength of LifeSpring, its operations (management) is perfectly aligned with the organization's vision and quality is achieved via highly standardized procedures for maternal care service.

This case will cover two important aspects of BOP and social innovation. MBA students will investigate an innovative business model and apply their analytical skills to analyse the sustainability of the model.

Teaching notes and exercise for class-based discussion.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss innovative consumer marketing approaches for simultaneous business success and social empowerment at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) or in subsistence marketplaces.

The paper draws from a research program comprising qualitative methods as well as case study analyses. The central aspect of the approach to this topic is that it is a bottom‐up perspective grounded in understanding consumers. The theoretical scope of the paper includes consumption, entrepreneurship, and social capital in impoverished environments.

The authors' key finding is that businesses must follow three principles for consumer marketing – deep understanding of subsistence consumer psychology, social embeddedness, and entrepreneurial empowerment.

This research has implications for theoretical and empirical advancement in the areas of structuring marketing activities, social embeddedness of marketing, and consumer policy.

This research has implications for several aspects of consumer marketing strategy. The authors categorize these under the following: marketplace research, marketplace solutions, value propositions, communications, partnerships, harnessing social capital, designing marketing structure, and evolving the marketing mindset.

This paper suggests that consumption and entrepreneurial productivity are inextricably linked in subsistence contexts with important implications for consumer marketing. The paper has value to BOP researchers and BOP business practitioners wishing to take a nuanced view to understand their markets and serve them better.

This paper aims to numerically study the compositional flow of two- and three-phase fluids in one-dimensional porous media and to make a comparison between several upwind and central numerical schemes.

Implicit pressure explicit composition (IMPEC) procedure is used for discretization of governing equations. The pressure equation is solved implicitly, whereas the mass conservation equations are solved explicitly using different upwind (UPW) and central (CEN) numerical schemes. These include classical upwind (UPW-CLS), flux-based decomposition upwind (UPW-FLX), variable-based decomposition upwind (UPW-VAR), Roe’s upwind (UPW-ROE), local Lax–Friedrichs (CEN-LLF), dominant wave (CEN-DW), Harten–Lax–van Leer (HLL) and newly proposed modified dominant wave (CEN-MDW) schemes. To achieve higher resolution, high-order data generated by either monotone upstream-centered schemes for conservation laws (MUSCL) or weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) reconstructions are used.

It was found that the new CEN-MDW scheme can accurately solve multiphase compositional flow equations. This scheme uses most of the information in flux function while it has a moderate computational cost as a consequence of using simple algebraic formula for the wave speed approximation. Moreover, numerically calculated wave structure is shown to be used as a tool for a priori estimation of problematic regions, i.e. degenerate, umbilic and elliptic points, which require applying correction procedures to produce physically acceptable (entropy) solutions.

This paper is concerned with one-dimensional study of compositional two- and three-phase flows in porous media. Temperature is assumed constant and the physical model accounts for miscibility and compressibility of fluids, whereas gravity and capillary effects are neglected.

The proposed numerical scheme can be efficiently used for solving two- and three-phase compositional flows in porous media with a low computational cost which is especially useful when the number of chemical species increases.

A new central scheme is proposed that leads to improved accuracy and computational efficiency. Moreover, to the best of authors knowledge, this is the first time that the wave structure of compositional model is investigated numerically to determine the problematic situations during numerical solution and adopt appropriate correction techniques.

The Resilient Corporation survives adversity by refusing to follow the pack.