Social Innovation, Inc.: 5 Strategies for Driving Business Growth through Social Change

Chapter 5. STRATEGY TWO: ENTER NEW MARKETS THROUGH BACKDOOR CHANNELS

One way to grow your business is to use social innovation to invent new products and services; another is to use social innovation to invent new markets. Many of the largest and most lucrative business markets—geographic and demographic—are also the most mature (and competitive) markets. Yet the great untapped markets that remain—inner cities, developing countries, marginalized demographics, and other "sub-markets"—are often perceived as impenetrable, because they are either hard to reach, underdeveloped, undereducated, or all of these. The barriers to entering these markets are different from most: they are social barriers, not competitive barriers. In fact, these markets have ...