This coming June, as many as 100 academicians, business practitioners and social enterprise leaders will come together for the second subsistence marketplace conference at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Unique to this enclave is a bottom-up approach to subsistence marketplaces, focusing on better understanding and responding to the people - consumers and entrepreneurs - who live at or near subsistence, and who comprise a majority of the world's population. This bottom-up focus is distinct from the macro-level economic approaches, and mid-level business strategy approaches, such as the base of the pyramid (BOP), that has characterized research on this topic.   The first subsistence marketplaces conference was an undeniable success, energizing projects and collaborative arrangements that cut across traditional boundaries and a collection of readings published as a volume in the Advances in International Management series by Elsevier in 2007. We expect even more great outcomes from the second conference.

This second gathering aims to give visibility and critical assessment to new developments in our study and respond to subsistence marketplaces over the last two years. The fundamental motivation for this conference is the same as the first – to apply contemporary and rigorous scholarship from academic, business and social enterprise sources to the task of meeting the needs of subsistence consumers and small merchants in ways that are economically, socially and ecologically sustainable. The upcoming conference will retain the distinctive bottom-up approach to understanding subsistence marketplaces based on buyer, seller and other market constituent behaviors. Sessions will draw on academic research, business practice, social entrepreneurship and management education, in the realm of subsistence marketplaces. The conference will be of interest to a variety of audiences including academicians, social entrepreneurs, policy makers, business practitioners and NGOs across their broad spectrum of activity. It will again combine a keynote address, presentations from invited guests and presentations of papers submitted in response to our call, with the added benefit of an increasingly vibrant and synergistic array of outputs because of the growing maturity of these areas of inquiry. Our keynote address will be delivered by Stuart Hart (Samuel C. Johnson Chair in Sustainable Global Enterprise, Cornell University, author of Inclusive Capitalism). Presenters include Bill Blackburn (Author of the Sustainability Handbook, Paul Munsen (sunoven.com), and Verghese Jacob (Byrraju Foundation, India).We have planned presentations by academic researchers, business practitioners and social entrepreneurs. The talks will cover basic research, teaching and practice. 

The conference will run from the evening of Friday, June 13 to Sunday, June 15 with keynote addresses on Friday and Saturday as well as concurrent sessions on Sunday. The proposed schedule allows for a dynamic and fast moving conference, along with adequate opportunities for our guests to enjoy the great city of Chicago. Finally, a special issue of the Journal of Business Research of selected papers based on conference presentations is planned.