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The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid
Prahalad's 2004 book challenging the global business community to recognize four billion low-income people as entrepreneurs, consumers, and co-creators of value whose participation was blocked by failures of access and imagination, not deficiencies of intelligence or ambition.
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits was Prahalad's 2004 Wharton School Publishing book that reordered the global business community's understanding of the relationship between corporate strategy and poverty. The argument was characteristically direct: four billion people at the base of the global economic pyramid are not objects of charity. They are entrepreneurs, value-conscious consumers, and innovative problem-solvers whose participation in the global economy is blocked not by deficiencies of intelligence or ambition but by deficiencies of access.
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The book was controversial. Development economists — including Aneel Karnani's 2007 California Management Review critique — accused Prahalad of romanticizing poverty and overestimating the purchasing power of populations whose actual consumption would not support the business models he proposed. Business executives accused him of naivety about the costs of serving low-income markets. Both critiques