It is estimated that one billion people around the world need vision correction but don't have glasses because they are too expensive or simply unavailable. The resulting losses in productivity and self-sufficiency may reach as much as $70 billion annually, experts say.

Neil Houghton (MBA '01) hadn't really thought about this problem until he visited Peru and noticed that hardly anybody there wore glasses. Back at HBS, in Associate Professor Stefan Thomke's elective course Managing Product Development, Houghton started developing glasses that would be inexpensive to produce and ship and that could be prescribed, assembled, and fitted in the field by trained microentrepreneurs rather than by optometrists or ophthalmologists.

The next step was to form a "Low Cost Available Eyeglasses" (LCAE) team and enter the HBS Business Plan Contest, which this year for the first time had a separate social-enterprise track to complement its traditional business competition. Houghton was joined by Ashley Magargee and Naomi Weinberg (both MBA '01), along with Marcel Acosta, a Loeb Fellow at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, and Rachel Ross, the enterprise's first employee, who conducted field research in Nicaragua. Last spring, the plan designed by the LCAE team, whose advisors included Thomke, entrepreneurs, consultants, product designers, and ophthalmologists, was selected as the winning entry over ten other social-enterprise submissions.

For many people in the developing world, a pair of eyeglasses can cost more than a month's wages. That's because much of the world relies on highly trained specialists who use sophisticated and expensive equipment, in a market that provides consumers with choice and fashion in eyewear. By contrast, with the Low Cost Available Eyeglasses solution, a microentrepreneur borrows from a microfinance institution, such as ACCION International or Grameen Bank, to pay for a testing kit and eyeglass supplies. The entrepreneur, who also undergoes a one-week training session, will then be able to sell eyeglasses for less than five dollars a pair, with a margin of about one dollar to repay the loan and earn a profit.

The LCAE team is in the process of selecting countries in which to operate, examining factors such as market size, regulation, and access to suitable microfinance institutions. Houghton emphasizes that Low Cost Available Eyeglasses is an enterprise, not a charity: "We're trying to set up a system that, as it becomes more useful to people and is used more, will be inherently better funded because it's funded by the end user."

Adapted from an article, by Andrea Schulman and Carla
Tishler, posted on the HBS Working Knowledge portal
www.workingknowledge.hbs.edu.

Post a Comment