What the Mobile Industry in the West can Learn from Ice Cream and African Villages

This approach can stimulate short-term consumer demand in highly developed markets. But what will people really be willing to pay for? There are lessons in examples from meeting needs in developing markets, which have far scarcer resources available and where services have to be that much more valuable to the user to be justifiable.

Value lies in services that meet a user's individual, local needs better, and recognize the context in which they are consumed. Critically, the providers of these services have considered packaging, distribution, and marketing - the whole of the supply chain - from the user's point of view. As a result they have produced genuine improvements in meeting needs, not just technical innovations in search of problems.

We'll describe the user-centered insight that led to Movirtu's Cloud Phone for base of the pyramid users in Africa and South Asia, and discuss how we are working to reinvent current pain points like European roaming. We'll show you examples of 'bottom up insight', and challenge you to find similar unmet needs and opportunities.