One of the grass-root thinkers of the Modern World is Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad better known as C. K. Prahalad.He left us on his heavenly journey on April 16 2010. The world lost one of its brightest brains. He gave us a gem in the form of a book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

One thing that this universally proved is that poor or the less privileged is not a burden to the developed nations or to the UN but rather an untapped market. The approach to this market is pay as you go.

A recent research by McKinsey & Company suggest that "Fully 2.5 billion of the world’s adults don’t use formal banks or semiformal microfinance institutions to save or borrow money, our research finds".

But it would be great if on this unbanked population geographic map we overlay the Micro-finance growth market.I am sure the maximum growth in Microfinance will come from areas that have the maximum density of unbanked population. The success of Micro-finance is a great academic and economic case study which re-emphasize the fact that the underprivileged is the largest economically untapped segment.
market.

Now something from the technology and services world. The theme of 2010 is Cloud Computing. Research estimates put that by 2010 approximately 2/3 of IT infrastructure services will move into in this virtual world.

But what this clutter is missing is that the quickest and biggest market for cloud in this recessionary market is the Start-up community. In this trying times when VC's are very selective in seed funding. Cloud computing will be the biggest compliment to Start-ups.

As the initial capital commitment is less the Start-up can use this Pay as you go services more effectively.The opportunity is for all large IT infrastructure companies, VC's, and vendors who shy away from start-ups. If the delivery model can be tuned as systematic investment plan keeping the operations cost low, the profit from catering to start-ups will be massive.But as in Micro-financing one has to due some basic credit assessment of the borrower so also in SAAS services one has to do the basic credit check. The idea is to sell less in quantity and more in volume.


The analogy is that Start-ups are at the bottom of the pyramid when it comes to financial attractiveness of services sector, where as a SAAS model of hand-holding will be a massive boost to the community.

What is common in SAAS, Microfinance and CK Prahald is that they showed us the road to success need not be always in selling to the high and mighty.

The road ahead for companies will be to adopt and accept the fact that to be successful they cannot ignore the underprivileged in our case the start-ups.

CK gave us an idea that has just scratched the surface of new ideas and we have miles to go...