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In recent years, management scholars and practitioners have been advocating a more prominent role for business in economic and social development at the "base of the pyramid" (BoP), where more than 1 billion people subsist on less than $2 a day. Yet, in both theory and practice, the development of financially sustainable and scalable business solutions for the BoP has been challenging. By integrating insights from the emerging BoP literature with extant research on the replication of organizational routines and templates, this study examines how the distinctive conditions of the BoP affect the development and replication of scalable business solutions for the world's poor. In particular, we identify key distinctive conditions of the BoP and develop an organizing framework of the mechanisms that facilitate the development and replication of viable and scalable business templates there. Our analysis contributes to BoP research by advancing understanding of the role of templates in economic and social development at the BoP as well as to research on the replication of organizational routines and templates by delineating the distinctive conditions and mechanisms that affect the development and replication of templates at the BoP.

Literature on categories recognizes that in the early stages of a category, ambiguity can arise from divergent frames used to define the category. Yet it also largely expects this ambiguity to be either temporary, or else detrimental to the survival and evolution of the category. In this study, we demonstrate and explain how, alternatively, category ambiguity can persist when multiple frames continue to be applied to a category as it progresses into maturity. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative study of the case of social entrepreneurship, we examine how and under what conditions this outcome occurs. We specify two co-occurring conditions that prompt category stakeholders to shift their framing from exclusive to inclusive, enabling category ambiguity to persist. We furthermore show how the use of category frames that draw from pre-existing resonant categories supports the persistence of category ambiguity. We contribute to literature on categories by clarifying the antecedents of category evolution towards a trajectory of persistent ambiguity.

Business School. His research is focused on the early moments of new markets and fields, with special emphasis on empirical contexts at the intersection of social, business, and public sectors.

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