Subsistence Marketplaces Initiative

We enable sustainable marketplaces through management and technology.
The Subsistence Marketplaces Initiative (SMI), in the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois, connects subsistence and sustainability, and the lessons learned are likely to be useful in all contexts to collectively face the challenges that confront humanity. We seek to develop and disseminate actionable knowledge for creating sustainable solutions for subsistence marketplaces. The radically different context of subsistence and the emphasis on sustainable solutions provides a very challenging setting for research, education, and practice in management.

Our goal is to understand and enable the progress from subsistence marketplaces to sustainable marketplaces, i.e., marketplaces characterized by sustainable production and consumption that enhance individual and community welfare and conserve natural resources.

SMI has pioneered a bottom-up approach that begins with a micro-level understanding of buyers, sellers, and subsistence marketplaces. We adopt a marketplace rather than a market orientation, viewing subsistence contexts as more than markets to sell to, rather as individuals, communities, and preexisting marketplaces to learn from. Our focus should be distinguished from macro-level economic approaches, and mid-level business strategy approaches such as base-of-the-pyramid (BOP) research.

Impact

Our work has led to a unique marketplace literacy educational program reaching more than 100,000 individuals in eight countries (India, USA, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Argentina, Mexico, and Honduras) through the Marketplace Literacy Project, a non-profit organization founded in concert with this initiative, and other partners. Marketplace literacy relates to skills, knowledge, self-confidence, and awareness of rights as consumers and entrepreneurs. Our program enables savings and purchase of better-quality products for subsistence consumers and the start of a new enterprise or expansion of an existing enterprise for entrepreneurs. Unique to marketplace literacy is an emphasis on know-why, or a deeper understanding of the marketplace, which our research showed was a particularly striking need among low-income, low-literate individuals.