If you missed C. K. Prahalad’s talk at Case’s Business as an Agent of World Benefit forum yesterday, you can try to make up for it by reading his latest book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

Despite John Kay’s (justifiable) slam in today’s Financial Times of an earlier Prahalad book (co-authored with Gary Hamel), much of what Prahalad proposes in his latest work makes good sense for those interested in the merging of technological innovation and economic development. Market based approaches to dealing with poverty can work and, perhaps even more importantly, empoverished regions are often the best sources of innovative new ideas and products.

It’s a real shame no one from Invacare or the Cleveland Clinic was at the session, since one of the examples Prahalad used in his talk was the development of a low-cost artificial foot to meet the unique and needs of a poor Indian population. In the US, an artificial foot can cost $10,000, and has to meet less rigorous specifications (in terms of functionality) than an artificial foot in India, where people frequently go barefoot, spend more time squatting than sitting in comfortable chairs, and frequently need to perform tasks–such as climbing a tree–than we do here in the US. Prahald showed a brief video detailing how the foot is constructed and showing a wearer of it running barefoot, climbing a tree and then jumping out of the tree from about 8 or 10 feet up, with no problems at all. The cost? $25 US.

We in the west are accustomed to thinking that our advanced technological prowess needs to be cascaded out to the rest of the world because we’ve already gone through the steep learning curve such prowess requires, whereas the rest of the world hasn’t. But sometimes we might do better to let go of our assumptions and assume a “forgetting curve,” shedding ourselves of our beliefs about high tech and the need for ever increasingly complex solutions. Sometimes the most innovative solution is the simpler, cheaper one. It’s still technology, but appropriate technology as opposed to technology for technology’s sake.

In an earlier post we cited Procter & Gamble’s Mark Peterson’s comment about moving from a “not invented here” mentality to a “proudly found elsewhere” outlook. Imagine if, instead of bemoaning how China has taken all our manufacturing jobs, we instead looked to India, China, and other parts of the world for creative, low-cost solutions that we could import and capitalize on here, creating new, competitive regionally-based global industries in the process?