Customer vs. Citizen

Yesterday I attended a fascinating meeting at Rockefeller Foundation that brought innovation experts together with leaders from the Foundation to discuss potential scenarios by which technological innovation will (or will not) improve prospects for development. Much of our discussion echoed the class session on "IT4D" (highlighting the importance of innovation in the social processes and business models that can faciliate adoption and scale-up of technology use, rather than just innovation of new products).
When we discussed the provision of basic services to poor communities, one of the experts used language that captures very nicely (and better than I did in class) the unique nature of these business models: she noted that when your business is providing basic services (like water, education, healthcare, etc.) to poor people you are dealing with "citizens not customers".
This is a great way to think about what we have been saying in many of our class sessions. To provide a product to a citizen sustainably requires more than just selling a better product at a lower price. The business innovator has to understand not only the consumer's preferences, but also the way politics will intercede, the way ideas about rights will influence your brand and customer behavior, the way entrenched interests in the current system can thwart your business growth, etc.
When I said that your business training is dangerous when you look to sell basic services into this market segment, I was simply saying that everything you know about serving "customers" can blind you to the complexity of serving "citizens." Being savvy about serving customers is necessary but insufficient to succeed in this market. The trade-off to the extra challenge is extra reward: providing citizens with an improved product is also much more rewarding as the positive spillovers to society (and the gratification to the business owner and manager) can far exceed the gratification of simply making profits from consumers.