Four billion people living on less than two dollars a day were not a charity case but a market.
Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad was born in Chennai, India, in 1941. He studied physics at the University of Madras, then earned an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and a doctorate from Harvard Business School. He spent most of his career at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.1
In 1990, Prahalad and Gary Hamel published "The Core Competence of the Corporation" in the Harvard Business Review. The article argued that companies should compete not on individual products but on underlying capabilities that could be deployed across multiple markets. The concept reshaped corporate strategy for a generation.2
His most provocative work came in 2004 with The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. The book argued that approximately four billion people living on less than two dollars a day represented an enormous untapped market. Businesses that designed affordable products and services for this population could generate profit while reducing poverty.3
The argument overturned a core assumption: that the poor existed outside the economy, as recipients of aid rather than participants in markets. Prahalad showed examples of companies that had profited by serving low-income consumers, from single-serve shampoo packets in India to mobile banking in Africa.4
Critics argued that Prahalad’s framework risked romanticizing poverty or encouraging exploitative pricing. Prahalad responded that the alternative, waiting for governments and nonprofits to solve the problem alone, had failed for decades.5
Prahalad died on April 16, 2010, in San Diego, at the age of sixty-eight. The Times of India and the Economist ranked him among the most influential business thinkers of his era.6 His central question, whether the global economic system treats billions of working people as participants or as afterthoughts, has only grown more urgent since.