Sustainable Innovation for Subsistence Marketplaces

Overview

This Sustainable Innovation for Subsistence Marketplaces offered by Coursera in partnership with University of Illinois focuses on understanding subsistence marketplaces and designing business solutions for the billions of people living in poverty in the global marketplace.

To develop understanding of these markets, we use exercises to that enable learners to view the world from the eyes of subsistence consumers and entrepreneurs, facilitate bottom‐up understanding generated by participants, and provide insights from extensive research.

More broadly, the course uses the context of extreme resource constraints to learn about the bottom-up approach pioneered through the Subsistence Marketplaces Initiative and apply it in broadly. A parallel project will focus on understanding a specific need in a subsistence marketplace, and designing a solution and an enterprise plan for implementation.

Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to:

• Develop an understanding of subsistence marketplaces

• Design solutions for subsistence marketplaces

• Develop enterprise plans to implement solutions for subsistence marketplaces

• Apply the bottom-up approach for subsistence marketplaces as well as other contexts