[Stoves] News 7 September 2016: Biolite CEO in Harvard Business Review

[Traveller]

>
> https://hbr.org/2016/09/how-one-startup-developed-a-sales-
> model-that-works-in-emerging-markets
>
> How One Startup Developed a Sales Model That Works in Emerging Markets,
> Jonathan Cedar, HBR online 7 September 2016
>
> Good thing he doesn't talk about EPA/ISO or premature mortality, killing
> by assumptions.
>
> Interesting lessons.
>
> I have a memory from January 2012, visit to a medium-sized town of Chhota
> Udaipur in eastern Gujarat, India. I copy below an e-mail I had sent out to
> friends then, with three pictures attached.
>
> What sells in Peoria - or Washington, DC - doesn't necessarily sell in
> Pandharpur.
>
> At least, Biolite has shown that there are lessons to be learned out there
> among the people, not in labs under WBT protocol or in IHME computers
> cooking up deaths.
>
> N
> --------------
> About three months ago I spent a day in eastern Gujarat - a village called
> Virpur and a town called Chhota Udepur.
>
> My first time. In the Chhota Udepur market, I found a "stove shop"; it was
> selling LPG stoves with a large single burner for the
> commercial/institutional customers. I went in the shop and talked to the
> owners. The old man has been selling and repairing kerosene stoves and
> lamps for some 40 years. Pictures a, b, and e show he still has kerosene
> lamps (electricity is fairly extensive and the supplies are reliable, so
> kerosene is as backup or for farm use, or for poorest people with
> low-quality home or no home) and also sells metal wood and charcoal stoves.
> The colorful small cylinders are for pressurized kerosene stoves.
>
> I am learning Gujarat is unusual - my village of some 3-4,000 people back
> in 1940 used to have coal and charcoal, kerosene came in the 1950s and LPG
> in the 1970s. But, apart from the demand side (affordability, readiness to
> change), the existence of delivery chains such as these also played a great
> role. For towns like Chhota Udepur, LPG stoves from LPG franchisees started
> in the 1980s and the 1990s, but even then it was up to this small stove
> shop to innovate and make stoves for the commercial, institutional market
> (and repair the household LPG stoves cheaply).
>
> After talking to the shop-keeper, I walked across to a tea-seller on a
> bicycle cart. He had an LPG bottle and a stove that sounded (loud hissing)
> like the kerosene pressure stove (Primus in my childhood). I was puzzled.
> This wasn't the ring burner with holes all around that is usual with LPG
> stoves small and large. The man showed me the burner - looked like a pipe,
> about an inch wide, straight up. He had a pilot light, and regulated gas
> flow with a knob. He didn't have to light the burner, the gas flow was
> fast, and he could heat up his aluminum kettle where he kept tea ready,
> serve me a cup, and turn the stove off.
>
> How many "improved", "advanced", "fortified" - or let's say "modern",
> "gas-like" - wood stoves will reach such shops and such users, if not in
> Gujarat (which has a lot of wood/dung use in villages) then other parts of
> India and elsewhere in the world?
>
> I could fantasize that tomorrow's teenagers - new wives too, since many
> girls are married before they are 18 - can be marketed to by use of mobile
> phones and that shops like these are a relic of the past, would keep
> serving the current generations till they die out.
>
> Still, I think the GACCis should go live in villages for a while.
>
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