Designing and Orchestrating Embedded Innovation Networks: An Inquiry into Microfranchising in Bangladesh

Social franchising as rural entrepreneurial ecosystem development

“…Social franchising (also known as microfranchising) is a relatively new social enterprise approach to poverty alleviation, emerging in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s (Lawson-Lartego, 2016). Social franchising takes the concepts of regular business franchising (as exemplified by the familiar examples of The Body Shop, Starbucks, Subway, and McDonalds) and applies it to microentrepreneurship development in low-income contexts (Jones-Christensen et al, 2010).…”

Inside Barefoot Economics

“…To deal with such institutional challenges, it was proposed that the concept of microfranchising should undergo adaptations in line with Prahalad's emphasis on the need of bottomup approaches to institutional capacity building (see Kistruck et al 2011). These considerations gave rise to the concept of bottom-up franchising (Henriques & Herr 2007;Munoz et al 2010; see also Kistruck et al 2011;Lawson-Lartego 2016). While microfranchising was originally conceptualised by Fairbourne et al in line with the top-down approach of traditional franchising, in which the franchisor is supposed to create and provide a turn-key business model, bottom-up franchising lets the microfranchisees themselves co-create their common operational system based on collective decision making (see ibid.…”

“…As empirical research has indicated that the performance drivers of microfranchising are significantly affected by the existing institutional framework at the base of the pyramid (e.g. Kistruck et al 2011), microfranchising has been increasingly called for as a variant of bottom-up franchising (see Fairbourne 2007;Henriques & Herr 2007;Munoz et al 2010;Kistruck et al 2011;Lawson-Lartego 2016). Within this bottomup approach, the franchised microentrepreneurs are supposed to co-create a replicable business model based on collective decision making (ibid.).…”