Eduardo MENDEZ LEON

Profile:

Eduardo Méndez-León held a Master's degree in Science from the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico. From October 2018, he is a Ph.D student at the Center de Recherches et d'Etudes Interdisciplinaires sur le Développement Durable (CREIDD) / Institut Charles Delaunay (University of Technology of Troyes, France) under the supervision of Ph.D Tatiana Reyes-Carrillo and Ph.D Rene Díaz-Pichardo.

Experience:

Business advise, Public Policy, and Managerial advice.

Research Interests:

Sustainable Development, Sustainable Value, Sustainable Business Models, Base of the Pyramid, Product-Service System, Co-creation.

Current Project:

Analysis of Sustainable Value in SBMs for the Base of the Pyramid.

Summary:

The integration of sustainability in strategies for low-income contexts has been identified as a relevant factor for Sustainable Business Models (SBMs) research. Some years ago, poverty alleviation strategies proposed by the business’s domain had an economic bias. Today, society and environment also play an important role in the design of sustainable business models for poor people.

Particularly, in this research we argue that Design and Business fields have contributed to the contemporary SBMs proposals for the BoP, specifically; the constant business development transformation is linked to the BoP business development (Design Thinking, Sustainable Business Model Innovation, and DfS). The dynamic articulation of products, services and the involvement of diverse stakeholders (including the environment) build a sustainable business model that is able to address sustainability and competitiveness at the same time. According to some authors, the Product-Service System (PSS) is a particular model that could be a sustainable response to problems faced at the BoP.

From the innovative and strategic perspective, we assume that sustainable value is the key concept within SBMs and PSS for the BoP, however; what is sustainable value and how these sustainable business models create this value is something not clearly explained in the literature. The objective of this research is to contribute to a better understanding of how SBMs create sustainable value in the BoP. To do that, we propose to structure the sustainable value using the current insights of value and explore the particular dynamics among the multiple stakeholders that emerge because of the BoP intervention in the different phases of the model.

Our assumption is that improving the understanding of how sustainable businesses create value for the BoP could facilitate the adoption of these strategies towards more sustainable solutions for poor context.