This article criticizes recent Bottom (or, Base) of the Pyramid (BoP) approaches for ‘cancelling out politics’ by obscuring unequal power relations at different societal levels and painting an optimistic picture of win-win outcomes that will make (some of) the world’s biggest corporations richer while simultaneously adding a few crucial pennies to the pockets of the poor. The article is thus positioned within a growing stream of literature critical of BoP ideas, but it goes further than existing critiques by arguing that the current BoP discourse serves an important ideological function for global capital, specifically producing a discursive depoliticization of its corporate interventions in the lives of the world’s poor. We argue that the poverty-reduction outcome of a BoP venture is contingent on its practice on the ground, which will inevitably be shaped by local and global power relations. In particular, we point to three cultural-political issues overlooked by the BoP discourse, which are vital in understanding the practice of business ventures at the BoP: adverse power relationships within poor communities; social-epistemological hierarchies between the poor and outsiders who administer poverty-reduction interventions; and local vulnerabilities induced by global currents in products, services, information and ideologies.

Strategic niche management (SNM) is a recently developed approach that could help induce a broad socio-technical transition towards more sustainable development. It is designed to facilitate the introduction and diffusion of new sustainable technologies through protected societal experiments in fields such wind energy, biogas, public transport systems, electric vehicle transport and eco-friendly food production. A major challenge in SNM concerns the processes by which such experiments can evolve into viable market niches and ultimately contribute to a broader shift towards sustainable development. This paper sheds more light on this issue by systematically consolidating the main SNM studies, and by bringing in new insights from the literature that is in some sense complementary to SNM. These are studies on the development and commercialisation of radical innovations in large companies, and literature about infant industry protection and broader industrialisation processes in developing countries. A number of suggestions for implementing SNM are given.

Responsible Innovation (RI) is a young field of research that has nevertheless had remarkable successes in dissemination within academic and political circles. However, there is relatively little awareness of its limits, blind spots and situations in which it cannot be used for actual innovation trajectories. Without such awareness, there is a risk that RI may get hollowed out and turned into a tool for ‘greenwashing’. To examine RI’s limits, we present a case study on biofuel innovation in Hassan, South India. This case study demonstrates that there are important barriers that may make it difficult to conduct innovation according to RI values. In particular, we highlight the following factors that emerge from our case study and need more attention in order to be included and adequately theorised in the RI literature: material barriers to innovation, engagement with abandoning or reducing existing practices as a consequence of innovation, power differences and dependencies, (un)clear demarcation of responsibilities, strategic behaviour and, lastly, different, diverging and even contradictory interests. We demonstrate that such factors may obstruct the possibility to innovate in a responsible way, leading us to our core observation that RI should be about innovating responsibly – or not innovating at all.