November 8th, 2008
Nokia Research on Mobile Phone Usage at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Part 2)
Welcome to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my combined feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!
In my previous post on Nokia’s research on mobile phone use at the bottom of the pyramid, I talked about the practice of sharing mobile phones and the challenges in designing a user interface for illiterate mobile phone users.
In this post, I’ll talk about the informal service infrastructure that supports mobile phone use at the bottom of the pyramid.
Here, Jan Chipchase documents informal repair cultures in the developing world and asks –
What can we learn from informal repair cultures? Aside from the benefits, what are the risks for consumers and for companies whose products are repaired, refurbished and resold? Given the benefit to (bottom of the pyramid) consumers are there elements of the repair ecosystem that can be exported to other cultures? Can the same skills be applied to other parts of the value chain? And, given the range of resources and skills available what would it take to turn cultures of repair into cultures of innovation?
Here, Jan Chipchase and Duncan Burns explore street hacks for mobile phones (an update of the informal repair culture presentation) –
Here, Stuart Henshall (not from Nokia) shares his experience in buying a ‘China phone’ at Mumbai’s Manish Market.
