INCLUSIVE BUSINESS

DeLab
Inclusive Business Made in Italy
As showed in the previous chapters, doing Inclusive
Business is challenging for a series of reasons that
range from the need to abandon the “business as usual
mentality” to that of solving technical requirements likely
to arise during the distribution phase or, for instance,
while engaging local stakeholders.
In order to respond to such challenges, entrepreneurs
are called to deploy innovative solutions, to
re-shape their business proposition and to align their
social and environmental expectations to the feedbacks
coming from low-income communities.
With that being said, it may look like Inclusive Business
is something aspirational. In other words, it seems
that a profit-driven solution to poverty-related problems
has to do with companies striving for an optimal balance
between social, environmental and economic values with
no clear ways to translate such theoretical ambition into
a real business model.
The aim of this chapter is to exemplify the basic aspects
of Inclusive Business and BOP Theory in view of
the Italian context, to highlight its hidden potential and
finally to shed light on the opportunity to adopt this innovative
approach at a national scale. This effort is meant
to translate what the academia suggested into practical
insights coming from two important sectors of Italy’s
industrial tradition.
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