Integrating Global Poverty Into Mainstream Business Classrooms

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Integrating Global Poverty Into Mainstream Business Classrooms Article in Journal of Teaching in International Business · January 2012 DOI: 10.1080/08975930.2012.687983

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Journal of Teaching in International Business, 23: 4–23, 2012 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0897-5930 print / 1528-6991 online DOI: 10.1080/08975930.2012.687983

Integrating Global Poverty Into Mainstream Business Classrooms Bruce Paton, Jason Harris-Boundy, and Peter Melhus Management Department, College of Business, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California, USA

Most of the products and services discussed in business curricula serve a small portion of humanity. But the great majority of economic growth over the next few decades is expected to occur in emerging and frontier markets. This emerging reality increases the urgency for including topics related to global poverty, unmet human needs, and emergence from poverty in conventional business curricula. This article describes several strategies the authors have employed to engage students’ imaginations as well as their analytical capabilities to address the business challenges and opportunities inherent in addressing global poverty. It also offers possibilities for expanding students’ concepts of themselves as business people and encouraging them to use their business skills to solve unmet human needs. Keywords: Global poverty, Base of the pyramid, Bottom of the pyramid, Pedagogy

1. INTRODUCTION Business schools are slowly waking up to the reality that most of the products and services discussed in business curricula serve a small portion of humanity. Fewer than 1 billion of the more than 7 billion human inhabitants of the planet earn more than $20,000 (or the equivalent buying power in their own economies; Prahalad & Hart, 2002). But the great majority of material goods—such as automobiles, computers, and airplanes—are produced mainly for this minority. In addition, the vast majority of communication technologies, and financial and information services have traditionally been designed for the needs of this minority of the human family. The great majority of the human population harbors unmet needs that businesses, until recently, have felt were outside their purview. Pioneering business scholars such as C. K. Prahalad, Stuart Hart, and their many successors have helped focus the attention of business practitioners and scholars on the opportunities at the so-called “bottom of the pyramid” (Prahalad & Hart, 2002, Prahalad, 2004, Hart, 2005). The bottom of the pyramid or “base of the pyramid” (BOP) concept suggests that business has a vital role to play in meeting the unmet needs of the 4 billion poorest people on the planet. A number of scholars and practitioners have focused on defining (Aggarwal, 2006) and in some cases, debating (Karnani, 2007) the magnitude of opportunity for businesses embodied in Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Bruce Paton, Associate Professor, Management Department, College of Business, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA. E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

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the base of the pyramid. Others have focused on identifying, explaining, and critically evaluating business efforts to meet the unmet needs of the poor (Prahalad, 2004; London & Hart, 2010). Relatively little has been written to date on the challenges of teaching business students about global poverty. A small number of business schools has begun to address global poverty in business in society courses or in dedicated elective courses (Aspen Institute, 2007). The business schools that introduced the base of the pyramid debate (including the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina, and Cornell University) based their teaching on their extensive international research programs. Generous sharing of materials among these pioneering schools has enabled additional business schools to address BOP business and microfinance in at least a small way in their curricula. This article focuses on the teaching methods and materials used in two schools—San Francisco State University and Monterey Institute of International Studies—that have been pioneers in teaching about the intersection between business and global poverty over the past 8 years (Aspen Institute, 2007). Our two schools have focused on methods for teaching about business’s role in alleviating global poverty. These efforts have progressed despite minimal budgets and the scarcity of readily usable teaching methods and materials. San Francisco State University offers undergraduate, MBA, and executive education programs, while the Monterey Institute of International Studies offers an International MBA. Both schools attract students from a broad array of countries, creating opportunities for students to explore cultural differences in every class. Neither school has had internal resources or external funds to use in building a curriculum on business and poverty. Instead, using home grown resources and borrowed materials, both schools have steadily increased awareness and interest among students about the significant opportunities and challenges in engaging business in meeting unmet needs of people living in emerging and frontier markets. We believe our experience can help other business schools begin the process of including poverty in an appropriate way in international business and management curricula. Poverty persists in every economy, and the dynamics of poverty may be very different in different regions of the world. We have chosen to focus primarily on poverty at the base of the pyramid for a variety of reasons. First, the base of the pyramid includes anywhere from one-third to more than one-half of the human family. Second, in our experience, the causes and consequences of poverty, the scope and breadth of unmet human needs, and the variety of business innovations currently underway are more readily apparent to students in cultures outside their own. Third, while the literature on poverty in developed countries focuses largely on policy causes and consequences of poverty, the literature on poverty in emerging and frontier markets offers a large and growing number of examples of business interventions to address particular aspects of poverty. Finally, we have followed the lead of Prahalad and Hart (2002), Karnani (2007), and others who have engaged in debate whether opportunities for business at the base of the pyramid represent a potential “fortune” or a “mirage” (Karnani, 2007). We find that this scholarly debate resonates with our students, and encourages them to reflect on the proper role for business in addressing problems on a global scale. We begin this article with several challenges inherent in teaching about business and poverty. We then review several streams of pedagogy research relevant to addressing these barriers. In the heart of our article, we describe six strategies and frameworks we have used to engage students. We conclude by discussing implications and future needs.

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2. CHALLENGES IN TEACHING ABOUT POVERTY Teaching business students about poverty can be challenging for a variety of reasons. For many students, a class on these topics may be their first exposure to business outside the context of developed markets. The content is inherently international, reflecting working conditions and life experiences outside the experience of many U.S. educated students. Others, whose own lives started in impoverished communities, may view poverty as a set of conditions to escape from, not a set of realities to embrace through their work in business. One major hurdle is overcoming students’ belief that addressing poverty is strictly a cost to society and exclusively the responsibility of governments and non-profit organizations. Students may have a difficult time taking efforts to serve the needs of the world’s poor seriously as a business opportunity, despite the growing number of successful examples. Convincing these students that serving unmet needs is a legitimate business opportunity is both a challenge and a major motivation for introducing these topics into the business school curriculum. A second hurdle is the belief that poverty is simply a permanent part of the human condition. Many business practitioners and business students accept uncritically the biblical teaching that “the poor are always with us.” Challenging this often-unstated belief is a critical element of addressing BOP concepts in the business classroom. Because of these two hurdles, our task in teaching about business and poverty is not simply teaching tools and concepts. Rather, success in engaging students in addressing poverty alleviation requires challenging several key beliefs or assumptions. The first published article on the “bottom of the pyramid” (Prahalad & Hart, 2002) identified this challenge and helped launch our thinking about how to address it. Roy and Roy (2010) advocate a “holistic pedagogical approach” focused on application of management skills to “address the needs of impoverished individuals” as well as a “bottom up” approach focused on addressing social needs while simultaneously creating wealth. Simply put, success in this area requires a pedagogy that challenges students’ assumptions, engages their emotions and compassion, and builds their skills. To address these challenges, we have drawn on at least three areas of pedagogical research.

3. PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES TO BUSINESS AND POVERTY Our approach to teaching about business and poverty draws on three broad bodies of pedagogical research—experiential learning, whole person learning, and service learning. We have explored these streams of thought in several different course settings and have attempted to integrate them with varying degrees of success. In this section, we summarize key concepts from each of these research streams before explaining their application in our classrooms in the next section. 3.1. Experiential Learning Experiential learning focuses on the creation of concrete experiences that are intended to “heighten students’ awareness of themselves and their environment” (McMullan & Cahoon, 1979, p. 453). It has influenced education since early in the 20th century (Houde, 2007) with

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its foundations established by such early experiential theoreticians as Dewey (1938) and Lewin (1948). As summarized by Kolb and Kolb (2005), the theory of experiential learning is based on six “propositions”: 1. Learning is a process, not an outcome. To be most effective, this process needs to include feedback on the effectiveness of the students’ learning efforts. 2. The learning process should draw out the students’ beliefs and ideas about a topic so that they can be examined, tested, and integrated with new ideas. 3. Disagreement drives the learning process since it forces the students to fluctuate between reflection and action and feeling and thinking. 4. The learning process is one of adaptation to the world and as such it involves the total person—thinking, feeling, perceiving, and behaving. 5. Learning results from integrating new experiences into existing concepts. 6. Learning is the process of creating knowledge. Experiential Learning Theory (ELT) presumes a constructivist model of learning rather than the more conventional model in which ideas are transmitted to the learner. The constructivist model focuses on knowledge being created in the personal cognition of the student. ELT portrays the learning process as one in which the student experiences the learning situation, reflects on it, thinks about it, and acts upon it in an iterative process (Kolb & Kolb, 2005). ELT differs from other theories of management learning as a result of its focus on the interaction of multiple aspects of learning, that is experience, cognition, reflection, and action (Kayes, 2002). When applied to management learning, ELT suggests managers learn by recognizing and responding to diverse environmental and personal demands and the interaction between two interdependent dimensions of knowledge—acquisition and transformation. The acquisition dimension requires an individual to consider simultaneously her concrete experience and her abstract conceptualization. The transformation dimension of learning also involves simultaneous consideration, this time of reflective observation and active experimentation (Kayes, 2002). While popular with many academics, ELT is also criticized by many. The criticisms generally focus on its theoretical limitations and on the empirical validation of the theory and its instrumentation in the Learning Style Inventory. While most of the issues related to the empirical limitations have been resolved, the debate continues with respect to its theoretical limitations. The arguments relate to ELT’s overemphasis on individual experience and underemphasis of the social, political, and cultural aspects of learning. Notwithstanding these criticisms, ELT continues to enjoy considerable influence in management learning due to its explanatory strength and practical significance. Kolb and Kolb (2005) draw from their research several educational principles that are relevant to our teaching on business and poverty. They conclude that an experiential, growth-producing learning experience refers both to the student’s experience related to the subject matter and to her total life experience to that point. They also conclude that people start the learning process from their own experiences related to the subject under study. Indeed, they suggest that the effective educator builds on what the students already believe. Kolb and Kolb argue that conversation yields learning, yet the classroom setting seldom provides opportunities for conversations. Such conversations facilitate reflection and understanding as well as feeling and thinking, thereby enhancing the experiential learning. Finally, Kolb and Kolb conclude that encouraging students

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to take responsibility for their learning, rather than allowing them to be passive recipients of what they are taught, can greatly enhance their experiential learning. 3.2. Whole-Person Learning Research on whole-person learning (Yorks & Kasl, 2002) is an outgrowth of experiential learning that focuses on expanding pedagogy beyond purely cognitive approaches. Truly meaningful learning experiences require students to address topics through cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses to new information and experience. Unlike Experiential Learning Theory, which places significant emphasis on student’s abstract conceptualization, based on reflection about personal experience, whole-person learning often starts with students’ feelings and imagination. This emphasis on felt experience instead of on cognition as the starting point is a primary difference. Yorks and Kasl (2002) observe, that in ELT, “experience is a resource for learning that takes on meaning when we make it the object of reflection” (p. 184). Whole-person learning, which recognizes “multiple ways of knowing,” values the felt experience as important learning in its own right. When learners begin with emotional or “expressive” processes, Yorks and Kasl argue, they often are made aware of emotions they are bringing to the learning encounter. This connection with their own emotional state can be an important resource for students in developing empathy for others they may encounter in very different circumstances. Hoover, Giamatista, Sorenson, and Bommer (2010) point out that in whole person learning, “ the acquisition of behavioral skills must be accompanied by two closely linked emotional components—an emotional commitment to the application of newly acquired skills and a level of emotional control and emotional management necessary for successful application” (p. 193). We find this perspective particularly applicable to the study of business and poverty. One powerful application of this approach can be found in L. D. Fink’s (2003) book, Creating Significant Learning Experiences. Fink makes a compelling case that in order to create lasting learning, college level courses need to be designed to address six key categories of knowledge and attitudes. These include: foundational knowledge and skills; application; integration; the “human dimension”; caring; and learning how to learn. We have explicitly incorporated this approach into several of the courses addressed in this article. Table 1 shows the course goals from an MBA course on business and poverty offered by both schools. 3.3. Service Learning Service learning presents a compelling strategy for engaging students in a manner that can produce significant attitudinal and behavioral change, while simultaneously adding significantly to students’ awareness and understanding. In an article with deep criticism and recommendations for higher education in general, Altman (1996) identified three domains of knowledge that are necessary for good citizens. The first two might be well-established in our current system, but the third far less so. The first domain is foundational knowledge, with its discipline-related history, content, theories, and methodology, combined with a liberal or cross-disciplinary education. The second domain is professional knowledge, with its technical information and practical skills training. The third domain Altman

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TABLE 1 Learning Goals From Mgmt 858: Sustainability and Business Opportunity Goal

Desired Skills and Behaviors

Foundational knowledge and skills

Understand key ideas and perspectives, and apply basic skills. A. Understand and be able to apply key concepts, including: connections between poverty and sustainability, microcredit, “bottom of the pyramid” businesses, and sustainable livelihoods. B. Exercise skill in communications including: • engaging in constructive dialogue; • identifying, understanding, and responding to diverse viewpoints; • presenting analyses and arguments in spoken communications; and • communicating persuasively in writing.

Application

Be able to apply knowledge and skills. A. Design comprehensive business responses to emerging opportunities, and B. Evaluate the effectiveness of business efforts to address emerging needs, and formulate corrective actions to improve their implementation.

Integration

Connect concepts with your own experiences and responsibilities. A. Understand and articulate your own views on business as an agent of change in the developing world. B. Understand how issues of poverty and sustainability relate to your own life and work.

Human dimension

Relate concepts to yourself and others. A. Understand how business efforts to address poverty and sustainability issues have affected peoples’ lives. B. Think of yourself as a business person who can make a difference through your work in business.

Caring

Connect ideas with their own values and interests. Care about the role they play as business men and women in meeting real needs in the global community.

Learning how to learn

Be able to assemble new ideas and construct new knowledge.

labeled “socially responsive knowledge,” which involves students learning and acting directly on society’s problems in their communities. This third domain can be aided by the first two, but according to Altman must become “an integral part of our educational offerings” (p. 375). This educational and societal value is the foundation for service-learning pedagogy, which is used across a wide range of fields of study, including business. Service learning in business education contexts has received increasing attention and development (Godfrey, 1999; Ayers, et al., 2010; Weber & Englehart, 2011). Jacoby (1996) explained an oft-cited definition of service learning as “a form of experimental education in which students engage in activities that address human and community needs together with structured opportunities intentionally designed to promote student learning and development; service-learning combines service objectives with learning objectives with the intent that the activity change both the recipient and provider of the service” (p. 5) He continues, arguing that, “this is accomplished by combining service tasks with structured opportunities that link the task to self-reflection, self-discovery, and the acquisition and comprehension of values, skills, and knowledge content” (p. 5). According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a good service-learning activity requires that

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“students are not only doing good, but developing an understanding of how the problems they are addressing came about, how they can be alleviated, and what cannot be changed unless external structural changes are made” (Taylor, 2005, p. 364). Reflection activities and assignments can be powerful ways to guide critical thinking of students in the classroom. Citing much work about it by previous scholars, Goldberg and Coufal (2009) describe how critical thinking “can be defined as the ability to broaden and deepen one’s thinking through systematic intellectual self-assessment, internal reflection and collaborative validation” (p. 140). They studied the role of service-learning experiences on the development of critical thinking skills of students, and found that service-learning outcomes vary over time and can lead to eventual gains in maturity of thinking (Goldberg & Coufal, 2009). Whiting, de Pillis, and Hatch (2010) argue that in the area of global poverty, business is often viewed as the villain, but that this might be remedied as business educators integrate a five-phase program into the curriculum. A central component in the program they advocate is service learning. Not only can service-learning activities significantly broaden students’ perspectives, but they are also effective tools for bringing students into direct contact with communities and community needs, and enhance students’ problem solving capability. Service-learning activities combine academic rigor with practical relevance. They are set in contexts of civic engagement, which furnish students with a broader and richer educational experience (Godfrey, Illes, & Berry, 2005). Service-learning activities have been shown to be tailored to fit a wide range of different business courses—such as accounting (Oddo, 1998; Still & Clayton, 2004; Hocking, 2008), information systems (Rose, Rose, & Norman, 2005), marketing (Easterling & Rudell, 1997; Metcalf, 2010), human resource management (Madsen, 2004), project management (Larson & Drexler, 2010), and executive programs (Rhee & Sigler, 2010). Braun (2004) reviewed how critical thinking skills are taught in the business curriculum from a number of perspectives. She found that one of the ways critical thinking is approached is by underlying pedagogies such as critical theory, critical reflection, and critical systems thinking. Critical reflection focuses on critical thinking as a method of “questioning assumptions” and “foregrounding the processes of power and ideology” within institutional structures for “realizing a more just society” (Reynolds, 1999, p. 538). Our experience over the past 8 years has taught us to respect the contributions from each of these streams of pedagogical research. Engaging students in all three modes provides an educational experience that has more impact on students’ lives by engaging them both cognitively and emotionally as they attempt to make sense of the unfamiliar territory of global poverty. Next we explain six of the broad techniques we use to engage students with the challenges and opportunities at the interface between business and poverty.

4. TEACHING METHODS Teaching bottom of the pyramid concepts to business students requires a departure from more conventional teaching approaches. While poverty is as old as civilization, business recognition of global poverty is relatively recent. As a result, relatively little business theory and relatively few business cases are available for classroom use. Our teaching has adapted six strategies for teaching bottom of the pyramid concepts: “voice of the client” exercises; a “poverty traps” framework; “appreciative inquiry” cases; “show and

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tell” assignments; design challenge exercises; and service learning. This section describes these six strategies and provides examples that have proven effective. 4.1. “Voice of the Client” Exercises “Voice of the client” exercises use short narratives from websites, videos, and similar sources to make the experiences of the poor visible and real to students. These are critical to break down the emotional distance that students face in trying to apply their knowledge and skills to understanding the lives of people separated from them by geography, culture, and economic experience. A critical first step is getting students past a tendency to view the poor as “them,” that is, as others with whom one cannot identify. Video clips, short narratives, and other opportunities to hear from the poor in their own words are critically important. A simple technique we employ is to give each team of students a different two- to three-paragraph narrative from individuals living in poverty. Students are asked to read and discuss the narrative to identify the challenges the “clients” are experiencing and to reflect on the consequences. For example, narratives from women will often mention the challenges inherent in feeding, clothing, and educating their children. Students often identify without prompting that the large family size in many poor communities is a problem connected to fertility, health, and economic opportunity for women, and financial security for families. Narratives, particularly on film, help give the abstract issues of poverty a “local habitation and a name.” Used appropriately, these narratives can help engage students’ empathy and help them get past simplistic solutions based on preconceptions about the poor. They also can help students begin to understand the human face of “market demand” for goods and services that might help alleviate the symptoms, and in some cases the causes of poverty. At best, “voice of the client” narratives engage students both emotionally and intellectually as they seek to understand the causes of a person’s poverty and reflect on how goods and services we take for granted might help create a path out of poverty. The discussion process helps create a learning environment that promotes empathy as a shared value and a shared perspective on the materials. We encourage students to use the clients’ names when reporting their circumstances, to encourage reflection on the specific needs of individuals instead of making generalizations about “the poor.” A note of caution is appropriate here. Efforts to invoke pity for poor individuals are quite counterproductive, often leading to greater emotional distance and lower intellectual engagement with the topic. We have cautioned classes to be careful in their choices of photographs to use in presentations in order to avoid creating greater distance between the audience and the client populations. 4.2. Poverty Traps The poverty traps framework provides students with a process for diagnosing the causes of poverty in specific instances. The framework (Smith, 2005) identifies common traps that prevent the poor from escaping poverty. Smith identifies 16 “poverty traps” that serve to limit economic progress by the poor. Table 2 summarizes these traps. Identifying the concept of poverty traps and giving specific illustrations help reinforce the recognition that “poverty is not the fault of the poor.”

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Information

Debt bondage

Uninsurable-risk

Working capital

Business Traps

Mental health

Undernutrition and illness

High fertility

High proportion of family income devoted to repaying high interest rate loans. Lack of access to information concerning prices, job opportunities, government and legal processes.

Inadequate funds to procure necessary inventory or other materials necessary for business success. Risks such as catastrophic floods, crop damage, or loss of income from illness or death of a family member.

Inadequate nutrition to permit full economic participation. Acute or chronic health problems that prevent family members from working. Mental illness or sense of hopelessness that inhibit family economic progress.

Lack of basic literacy skills needed for employment or further education. Inadequate skills to participate in jobs or microenterprises requiring specialized skills. High birth rate.

Illiteracy

Low-skill

Children forced to work instead of going to school.

Description

Family child labor

Personal and Family Traps

Trap

Contributing Factors

Inflexible banking requirements, underinvestment by financial industry. Reliance on inadequate traditional risk management strategies, underinvestment by insurance industries, newly emergent risks (e.g., AIDs, climate change). Lack of access to credit from banks and other regulated credit sources. Lack of IT infrastructure, low income, distance from centers of political power.

Illness, sense of powerlessness, poor diet, long working hours.

Inadequate family income, limited skills of parents, illness or death of parents, loss of parent to divorce. Requirements for child labor, inadequate schools, or lack of funds for schooling. Lack of schooling, lack of incentive to develop marketable skills, lack of job opportunity. High infant and child mortality, lack of savings to provide for old age, lack of access or religious prohibitions against birth control, lack of social and economic power for women. Inadequate sanitation, lack of clean water, lack of adequate calorie intake, unbalanced diet.

TABLE 2 The Poverty Traps Framework

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Degradation of grazing lands, forests, fisheries, and water sources. Inability to work together to solve community problems

Family members turning to crime instead of to legal work. Family members victimized by crime. Inability to improve economic condition because of institutional barriers, lack of resources, health problems, and other factors.

Farm erosion and depletion

Common property mismanagement Collective action

Criminality

Lack of time and slack resources, difficulty in coordinating community efforts Lack of access to jobs, credit, and other economic avenues for meeting basic needs. Lack of political representation and legal rights, lack of information about political and legal processes, religious divisions.

Lack of land ownership, small acreage, soil depletion, large family size. Population growth, reliance on subsistence farming, pressures to overproduce for market sale, lack of information about fertilizers, lack of access to organic (restorative) farming techniques. Lack of enforceable rules to protect common property resources.

Source: After S. C. Smith, (2005), “Ending Global Poverty: A Guide to What Works”, Chapter 1.

Powerlessness

Family labor devoted entirely to raising minimum survival requirements. Overuse or mismanagement of soil resources leading to reduced output.

Subsistence

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This framework is particularly effective to use with the “voice of the client” narratives described above. A two- or three-paragraph description from a client will typically identify four or more of the traps identified in the framework. This helps students understand that solutions that actually help clients emerge from poverty typically have to address multiple traps if they are to have any effect. We encourage students to use the traps framework to encourage them to understand a challenge or opportunity as fully as possible before moving toward solutions. Use of the poverty traps framework also creates a useful perspective for engaging students. Descriptions of poverty often provoke feelings of empathy, followed by a sense of hopelessness among business students. Students frequently express both surprise and dismay over the complexity of problems that poor individuals face. The poverty traps framework invites students to shift from an empathic emotional experience to an analytic approach. We often observe significant changes in body language and intensity of conversation after introducing the poverty traps framework. 4.3. Appreciative Inquiry “Appreciative inquiry cases” are accounts of attempts to address problems at the base of the pyramid. These “cases” challenge students to assess the problems addressed and evaluate the effectiveness of the attempts to solve them. The emphasis in these cases is to identify solutions that work, or that solve parts of a problem. Our goal is to develop in students, a body of knowledge concerning solutions that work in particular settings. We encourage students, when they are encountering new challenges, to draw on their knowledge of solutions that have worked in other instances, and to reflect on whether those solutions might be applied in new situations, and if so how they might be adapted appropriately. These cases become a shared vocabulary and a shared set of mental models for how they might approach future challenges. The appreciative inquiry approach encourages students to evaluate an existing example of practice. In this approach, students are asked to analyze questions such as the following: What did they do? How did it work? What traps did it address? What limitations did it show? Classroom examples are drawn from published articles, videos, or websites. Unsuccessful efforts may also serve as teaching tools. Candid accounts of failures or partial failures are relatively rare, but can be particularly insightful. For example, a case study of microinsurance in Uganda (McCord, Botero, & McCord, 2005) provides an example of a business that proves relatively successful financially, but fails to meet the needs of the clients effectively. Asking students to diagnose the sources of a solution’s shortcomings can be particularly useful for helping students learn to evaluate the underlying “theory of change” inherent in a solution. Following a diagnosis of the underlying shortcomings of a solution, students can be encouraged to explain how they might redesign the effort to achieve more favorable results. Our experience indicates that discussion of these cases provides students with opportunities to agree or disagree about the strengths and weaknesses of particular models. The fact that these cases are drawn from current practice and not filtered through the usual business case-writing process changes the role of the instructor. Rather than driving the discussion to a pre-determined end, the instructor leads participants to evaluate particular aspects of the case, but asks the participants to identify the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of particular practices. The discussions typically also include inviting students to reflect on other circumstances in which a practice might be applicable. In this manner, discussions shift from transferring knowledge and insight from instructor to students, to a joint creation of knowledge and insight.

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4.4. “Show and Tell” Assignments “Show and tell” assignments are structured web search assignments that encourage students to examine the huge range and scope of efforts to address poverty problems. These assignments ask students to search for and report on specific instances of microcredit, information and communication technology, or similar business innovations to serve the poor. An important part of engaging students’ imagination is structured exploration. “Show and tell” assignments set students up to succeed in finding information about solutions. These are assignments in which students are asked to find a specific instance of a microcredit or “bottom of the pyramid” business that interests them. Typically, these assignments involve giving the students a list of websites that may be useful for completing the task. Students are, of course, encouraged to explore other sites, but giving them some initial recommendations helps them get started with their explorations of an unfamiliar world. In a typical assignment, students would be asked to find a microfinance organization and present an overview of their business model, social organization, and any distinctive features. Similarly, students may be assigned the task of finding organizations addressing broad categories of problems such as providing “sustainable mobility” solutions, or innovative uses of information or communication technologies to address BOP problems. Students may be asked to give a brief presentation to the whole class, or to present their findings to their teammates in a small group. These assignments are particularly valuable if they provoke discussions within teams about the similarities and differences among the organizations team members found. Students are asked to choose a webpage from the site they found and turn in a copy to receive credit for the exercise. The webpages turned in become a valuable source of data for future exercises. One particularly useful exercise asks students to scan websites for the Stockholm Challenge (http://www.stockholmchallenge.org/) and the Tech Museum awards (http://www.techawards. org/). These sites highlight organizations that have made unique contributions to the base of the pyramid. These exercises emphasize learning how to find information and new ideas. They provide opportunities for students to be the primary content providers for a class session, and to share and discuss their discoveries with each other. The discussions provide opportunities for the instructor to fade into the background and allow students to take control of the learning process for short intervals. With repeated use of this form of exercise, we find students taking greater control of responsibility for the learning process. 4.5. Design Challenge Assignments “Design challenge” exercises harness students’ imagination by asking them to design business responses to specific problems. These exercises force students to project themselves into a problem-solving role. These can be simple classroom exercises or more elaborate, team-based research projects. Classroom exercises that have worked well for us include tasks such as: • “Sketch a business concept to address some aspect of rapid urbanization in China”; • “Pick a specific health or education challenge, and design a for-profit intervention”; or

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• “Imagine that we brought Internet services to your rural village in Tanzania. Describe a service you could provide to generate income for you and your family.” We have also used design exercises extensively for team-based research and writing assignments. Typically, the final project will be a business plan to meet an unmet need in a specific region. Students are asked to identify an unmet need and spend considerable time learning about the causes and consequences of this unmet need before proposing any solutions. Exhibit 1 illustrates a design assignment used as the final project for a course. Exhibit 1: A Design Challenge Assignment (Excerpt) Sustainability and Business Opportunity MGMT 858-SPRING 2011 TEAM PROJECT: OVERVIEW Purpose This assignment gives you a chance to reflect upon the materials we are covering in class and develop a business plan addressing an unmet need for people at the base of the pyramid (or some other aspect of sustainability). In addition, the assignment provides you with an opportunity to further develop your skills at library and web research, writing, public presentation, and working in a group setting. The assignment will be developed in three parts. Assignment overview Your team is part of a small consulting firm that specializes in creating business plans for organizations that are trying to meet the unmet needs of people at the base of the pyramid. The CEO of your firm has been successful because of the way she develops business plans for these organizations. She immerses herself in the organization as if she were its founding member. She creates within herself the passion that the founder(s) have and then uses it and her business skills to develop very successful business plans. Your consulting team is one of a group of new probationary teams in the firm. Your CEO has been happy with your team’s progress to date. She has crafted an assignment to see which of the teams will be removed from probation and will be asked to stay with the firm permanently. All of your teammates would like to stay with the firm because the compensation package is far better than anything else you can see at this time and, by working in this firm, you are able to help solve the world’s problems as you enjoy the fruits of the compensation package. The assignment she has crafted requires you to write a report to her and the firm’s Board of Directors. You are to supplement the written report with a short oral presentation to the same audience. Deliverables There are three deliverables associated with this project. The first deliverable is a preliminary bibliography and definition of the business opportunity due on March 1. The second is an oral presentation to the “CEO and Board of Directors” (your classmates) of the consulting firm to be delivered in class on May 3. The third is a written report to be emailed to me by 2:00 p.m., May 10 (a draft is due on April 19). The presentation Your presentation to the CEO and Board of Directors will last 13–15 minutes, and you will take questions for an additional 5 minutes. Each team member must speak during the presentation. The presentation must include visual aids in the form of PowerPoint slides. As with most boards of directors, the agenda for the May 3 meeting is quite full. Accordingly, you will be asked to stop your presentation after 15 minutes.

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We realize that there are significant pitfalls in designing a solution thousands of miles removed from the clients. However, we believe there is significant value in the exercise because it forces students to confront their lack of firsthand understanding, and to apply tools of estimation and interpolation as they deal with problems such as how many potential customers exist for their proposed product or service. We provide tools and worksheets to help students learn the basics of business model development, and business plan presentation. We find the tone of the class often changes dramatically when students begin to engage with the final design challenge assignment. Student engagement with the topic typically increases significantly. Students begin to engage the subject as designers and decision-makers, and typically shift their language to indicate identification with the user population for their proposed solution. Oral presentations are an important component of this phase. Students become very anxious to present their results and get feedback from classmates. (As a side benefit, students typically don’t exhibit the nervousness that typically accompanies other classroom presentation assignments.)

4.6. Service Learning During the current academic year, a colleague at San Francisco State has begun incorporating one element of service learning into the MBA course on business and poverty. Teams of students are engaged in projects with for-profit and non-profit organizations, helping them address current business challenges relevant to the poor. The incorporation of the projects in the course offers several advantages. First, the projects bring the problems addressed in the course closer to home, because they are situated in the local community. This has provoked reflections from students on the differences between “base of the pyramid” poverty, and the poverty in local communities. Second, service learning provokes a tension between the students’ ability to use their business skills to make significant contributions toward solving problems for community organizations, and the relative lack of power they feel in the (typically) entry-level positions they have experienced before or during their graduate studies. Finally, the service-learning projects force students to reflect more deeply on their role in the world as business professionals. In addition, this colleague has offered extra credit to students who volunteer for community organizations on a pre-approved list. This encouragement has helped engage students both emotionally and intellectually in specific problems within the local community, and offered opportunities for deeper reflection on their roles as skilled business people in helping to address community problems. One of the authors has also successfully incorporated service-learning pedagogy and experiences into an MBA-level principles of management course, in which students are organized into management consulting teams that work with community-based organizations or address social issues (Harris-Boundy, 2010). What develops is a unique partnership between students, faculty, and the community, where all become learning-focused problem solvers. These are projects in which skills and knowledge develop together. The intensity and persistence of student engagement in these service-learning projects has appeared to be much greater than in similar projects that focus on more mainstream corporate organizations where the focus is on traditional profit maximization. Examples of successful projects by these socially responsible student consultant teams include technology assessments for community services organizations, analyses of mentoring programs

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for disadvantaged youth organizations, organizational design work for HIV-AIDS and crime prevention programs, and strategic planning for organizations focusing on environmental concerns, or underserved and impoverished communities. Many student consulting teams have continued their projects well beyond the duration of the academic terms because of their sense of doing good and making a difference. Service-learning activities provide important opportunities for students to learn about and develop greater social responsibility. This sense of feeling responsibility with and for others develops in conjunction with discipline-related knowledge and skill development. To the degree that such activities awaken students to various community needs and to creative and collaborative ways of addressing those needs, it facilitates their development into better citizens. We have found that a significant number of students have chosen to integrate service learning into their own educational experiences, even without official sanction from the schools. For example, one team composed largely of members who had recently completed the business and poverty course, chose to complete the culminating project for the International MBA program at Monterey Institute by developing a business plan for rural farmers in Peru. The project included a self-financed summer of service learning in rural Peru, and has led to a continuing engagement with the local entrepreneurs. We believe that service-learning opportunities involving both domestic and international assignments offer significant opportunities for increasing the intensity and significance of the learning process.

5. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS Working with students to help them engage in addressing poverty has been enormously rewarding for us. We have taught courses ranging from undergraduate electives, to MBA courses in a sustainable business program, to required courses for mainstream students in MBA elective programs. In all cases, students have engaged enthusiastically in exploring unmet needs. The mix of teaching approaches has emerged organically as we have learned from each other and from our students. We have found that the three pedagogical approaches—experiential learning, whole person learning, and service learning—each bring different contributions to the learning experience. Table 3 summarizes the ways in which the six teaching strategies described above incorporate these pedagogical approaches. Both experiential learning and whole person learning play important roles in each of the six strategies. Service learning provides a very distinct but extremely powerful perspective compared with the other two approaches. Experiential learning emphasizes the cognitive dimension and encourages students to reflect on their prior experience and beliefs, and to evaluate how those help or hinder their understanding of the unique challenges defined by problems of global poverty. Whole person learning deliberately and unapologetically engages students’ emotions along with their cognitions. Service learning immerses students in a specific set of problems and forces them to cope with their cognitive and emotional responses. We can imagine teaching from any one of the approaches in isolation. But our experience indicates that engaging students in all three provides an educational experience that has more impact on students’ lives than any one of the strategies could provide on its own. We believe engaging students with the topic of global poverty has several important consequences. First, meeting the unmet needs of the poor will clearly be an essential pathway to economic growth as we enter the era of emerging markets. As companies discover that their

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Service Learning

Design Challenge exercises

“Show and Tell” assignments

Provides opportunities for reflection on previously held beliefs about poverty and unmet needs in their own community.

Engages students cognitively in evaluating the effectiveness of business solutions to problems of the poor. Engages students in the production of course content. Engages students in the use of both existing and newly acquired skills in designing solutions to unmet needs.

Appreciative Inquiry “cases”

Poverty Traps framework

Engages students in understanding the experiences of poor people. Provokes examination of previously held assumptions about poverty and the poor. Engages students cognitively in examining the causes and consequences of poverty.

“Voice of the Client” exercises

Experiential Learning

Engages students cognitively and emotionally in examining the causes and consequences of poverty. Engages students cognitively and emotionally in evaluating the effectiveness of business solutions. Requires students to identify their interests in particular topics. Requires students to project themselves into an imagined role as a skilled business problem solver encountering a very unfamiliar environment. Engages students both emotionally and intellectually in addressing business problems for a community organization.

Engages students emotionally in the causes and consequences of poor peoples’ circumstances.

Whole Person Learning

TABLE 3 Relationship Between Pedagogical Approaches and Teaching Strategies

Engages students in solving problems in their community.

Service Learning

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growth in developed markets has plateaued, business professionals will need to understand how to address business needs that are qualitatively different from many of the needs that they currently address. A focus on poverty helps convince students that the skills needed for future business success will inherently include a significant international component, and that they must address a broad range of new circumstances that their previous education has not prepared them for. Second, engaging with the real needs of others forces a subtle transformation in many students’ perception of their role as business people. Rather than viewing business’s role simply as providers of goods and services in established markets, students begin to see themselves as problem solvers helping to create markets that haven’t previously existed. In the process, they gradually lose many of the preconceptions they may have about the causes and consequences of poverty. Third, we believe that focusing on poverty inherently changes the relationship between teachers and learners. Paul and Mukhopadhyay (2004) observe that experiential learning puts “significant learning responsibility on the student, with the professor acting as the coach” (p. 11). The evolving nature of this topic places us in the extremely rewarding role as coach and role model for an active learning process that transforms many students’ image of their roles as business men and women. We also believe that engaging students with the growing global conversation concerning businesses’ role in addressing poverty has the ability to broaden and deepen students’ “moral imagination” (Werhane, 1999). While that phrase originally applied to visualizing alternative courses of action in times of crisis, we believe that engagement with business and poverty encourages students to visualize alternative goals and means for business and to visualize alternative identities for themselves as business people. We believe this is a vitally important role for business schools to undertake in a time of pervasive change. We hope that our efforts enable other educators to overcome the barriers we’ve identified and to begin to incorporate the topic of poverty in courses on management, international business, and other disciplines. Current research on pedagogy places considerable emphasis on assessment and assurance of learning. To date, we have not attempted to include assessment in our process in any formal way. This reflects the unusual role of courses on business and poverty in business curricula. Poverty is not a recognized business topic, with an established body of knowledge. At the same time, a course on poverty does not teach a unique body of skills with demonstrable behaviors, in the way that an accounting or decision sciences course might. To date, our assessment efforts have focused on demonstration of skills commonly assessed in other MBA courses—such as oral presentation skills, written analysis, and business planning. We believe that as the process of incorporating poverty into mainstream curricula matures, we will be able to assess students’ acquisition of particular content and skills in three specific areas. First, we believe that appropriately designed exercises can be developed to assess students’ ability to diagnose the major causes of and consequences from poverty for specific individuals or communities, and to identify specific unmet needs. Second, we believe written or oral assignments can be developed to assess students’ ability to critically evaluate specific business responses to problems and opportunities arising from poverty in specific communities. Finally, we believe that particular design challenges can be developed in order to assess students’ ability to create imaginative and effective innovations to address unmet needs. At the same time, we feel that assessing students’ emotional and attitudinal change is equally important, but more challenging to accomplish. We also profoundly hope that future assessment

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efforts will attempt to measure students’ capability for learning how to learn. We believe that courses on poverty provide significant opportunities for students to take charge of their learning, and to develop skills that advance this rapidly developing field.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES Bruce Paton is an Associate Professor at San Francisco State University, where he serves as Chair of the Management Department. He also serves as an adjunct Associate Professor at Monterey Institute of International Studies. His research interests focus on business models for poverty alleviation, application of design thinking to sustainable business issues, and processes for multistakeholder collaboration. Jason Harris-Boundy is an Assistant Professor of Management at San Francisco State University. His research interests include leadership, creativity, and change, as well as teaching effectiveness. Peter Melhus is an Assistant Professor of Management at San Francisco State University. His research interest focuses on sustainability in business, with an emphasis on multi-stakeholder collaboration. REFERENCES Aggarwal, Raj, (2006), “Business strategies for profitable sales to the poor: How free enterprise can fight poverty”, in Jain, Subhash, and Sushil, Vachani (eds.), Multinational Corporations and Global Poverty Reduction (Edward Elgar; Cheltenham, United Kingdom), pp. 125–141. Altman, Irwin, (1996). “Higher education and psychology in the millennium”, American Psychologist 51 (4), 371–378. Aspen Institute, (2007), “A closer look at business education: Bottom of the pyramid,” retrieved April 3, 2012, from http://www.caseplace.org/d.asp?d=1929 Ayers, Lauren, Tristan L. Gartin, Brannan D. Lahoda, Shannon R. Veyon, Megan Rushford, and Presha E. Neidermeyer, (2010), “Service learning: Bringing the business classroom to life”, American Journal of Business Education 3 (9), 55–60. Braun, Nora, (2004), “Critical thinking in the business curriculum”, Journal of Education for Business 79 (4), 232–236. Dewey, John, (1938), “Experience and Education”, (Perigee Books; New York, NY). Easterling, Debbie, and Fredrica Rudell, (1997), “Rationale, benefits, and methods of service-learning in marketing education”, Journal of Education for Business 73 (1), 58–61. Fink, L. Dee, (2003), “Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses”, (Josse Bass Higher and Adult Education; San Francisco, CA). Godfrey, Paul, (1999), “Service-learning and management education: A call to action”, Journal of Management Inquiry 8 (4), 363–378. Godfrey, Paul, Louise Illes, and Gregory Berry, (2005), “Creating breadth in business education through servicelearning”, Academy of Management Learning & Education 4 (3), 309–323. Goldberg, Lynette, and Kathy Coufal, (2009), “Reflections on service-learning, critical thinking, and cultural competence”, Journal of College Teaching and Learning 6 (6), 39–49. Harris-Boundy, Jason (2010), “Community service-learning with student team consulting projects”, in Cooksey, M. A., and Olivares, Kimberly (eds.), Quick Hits for Service-learning: Successful Strategies by Award-winning Teachers (Indiana University Press; Bloomington, IN). Hart, Stuart, (2005), “Capitalism at the Crossroads: The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World’s Most Difficult Problems”, (Wharton School Publishing; Philadelphia, PA).

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Hocking, Deborah, (2008), “Accounting in action: Learning in the field”, (Doctoral dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA). Available from Dissertations & Theses: The Humanities and Social Sciences Collection (Publication No. AAT 3346318). Hoover, J. Duane, Robert Giamatista, Ritch Sorenson, and William Bommer, (2010), “Assessing the effectiveness of whole person learning pedagogy in skill acquisition”, Academy of Management Learning and Education 9, 192–203. Houde, Joseph, (2007), “Analogically situated experiences: Creating insight through novel contexts”, Academy of Management Learning & Education 6 (3), 321–331. Jacoby, Barbara, (1996), “Service-learning in today’s higher education”, in Jacoby, Barbara (ed.), Service-Learning in Higher Education (Jossey-Bass; San Francisco, CA), pp. 3–25. Karnani, Aneel, (2007), “The mirage of marketing to the bottom of the pyramid”, California Management Review 49 (4), 90–111. Kayes, D. Christopher, (2002), “Experiential learning and its critics: Preserving the role of experience in management learning and education”, Academy of Management Learning & Education 1 (2), 137–149. Kolb, Alice, and David Kolb, (2005), “Learning styles and learning spaces: Enhancing experiential learning in higher education”, Academy of Management Learning & Education 4 (2), 193–212. Larson, Erik, and John Drexler, (2010), “Project management in real time: A service-learning project”, Journal of Management Education 34 (4), 551–573. Lewin, Kurt, (1948), “Resolving Social Conflicts: Selected Papers on Group Dynamics”, (Harper & Row; New York, NY). London, Ted, and Stuart Hart, (2010), “Next Generation Business Strategies for the Base of the Pyramid: New Approaches for Building Mutual Value”, (FT Press; Upper Saddle River, NJ). Madsen, Susan, (2004), “Academic service learning in human resource management education”, Journal of Education for Business 79 (6), 328–332. McCord, Michael, Felipe Botero, and Janet McCord, (2005), “AIG Uganda, CGAP working group on microinsurance good and bad practices case study no. 9”, retrieved from http://microfinancegateway.org/gm/document1.9.25652/25380 file AIG Good and Bad Practices No 9.pdf McMullan W. Ed, and Allan Cahoon, (1979), “Integrating abstract conceptualizing with experiential learning,” Academy of Management Review 4 (3), 453–458. Metcalf, Lynne, (2010), “Creating International Community Service Learning Experiences in a Capstone MarketingProjects Course”, Journal of Marketing Education 32 (2), 155–171. Oddo, Alfonso, (1998), “Service-learning in accounting: A department chair’s perspective”, in Rama, Dasaratha (ed.), Learning by Doing: Concepts and Models for Service Learning in Accounting (American Association of Accounting Education; Sarasota, FL), pp. 53–64. Paul, Pallab, and Kausiki Mukhopadhyay, (2004), “Experiential learning in international business education”, Journal of Teaching in International Business 16 (2), 7–25. Prahalad, Coimbatore, (2004), “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits”, (Wharton School Publishing; Philadelphia, PA). Prahalad, Coimbatore, and Stuart Hart, (2002), “The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid,” retrieved from http://www.cs. berkeley.edu/~brewer/ict4b/Fortune-BoP.pdf Reynolds, Michael, (1999), “Critical reflection and management education: Rehabilitating less hierarchical approaches”, Journal of Management Education 23 (5), 537–553. Rhee, Kenneth, and Tracey Sigler, (2010), “Developing enlightened leaders for industry and community: Executive education and service-learning”, Journal of Management Education 34 (1), 163. Rose, Jacob, Anna Rose, and Carolyn Norman, (2005), “A service-learning course in accounting information systems”, Journal of Information Systems 19 (2), 145–172. Roy, Abhijit, and Mousumi Roy, (2010), “Managing and leveraging poverty: Implications for teaching international business”, Journal of Teaching in International Business 21, 4–26. Smith, Stephen, (2005), “Ending Global Poverty: A Guide to What Works”, (Palgrave Macmillan; New York, NY). Still, Kelley, and Penny Clayton, (2004), “Utilizing service-learning in accounting programs”, Issues in Accounting Education 19 (4), 469–486. Taylor, Marilyn, (2005), “A service-learning kaleidoscope of insights: Conversations with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, theorist/systems change artist; Bernard Milano, practitioner/foundation leader; and John Saltmarsh, historian/service-learning educator”, Academy of Management Learning & Education 4 (3), 363–376.

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Weber, John, & Steven Englehart, (2011), “Enhancing business education through integrated curriculum delivery”, Journal of Management Development 30 (6), 558–568. Whiting, Vicki, Emmeline de Pillis, and John Hatch, (2010), “A five-phase approach to poverty eradication: An educational proposal for sustainable leadership and sustainable development”, The Journal of Corporate Citizenship 39, 41–56. Werhane, Patricia, (1999), “Moral imagination and management decision-making”, (Oxford University Press; New York, NY). Yorks, Lyle, and Elizabeth Kasl, (2002), “Toward theory and practice for whole person learning: Reconceptualizing experience and the role of affect”, Adult Education Quarterly 52, 176–192.

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