IXL Social Enterprise Case Studies Education January 2012 | Page 11

Revolutionizing the way to make education affordable for everyone
on Forbes’ list of top innovators, not only for
the sustainable way it produces its products, but
also for its product delivery model. Natura relies
on a direct sales model. Currently, they have
around 1.5 million “consultants” spread across
Brazil!41 These consultants build relationships in
their network and use these relationships to sell
cosmetics. The system works because all Natura
employees, including the sales consultants, are
strong believers in the company’s motto: “Well
being well,” meaning one has to have a good
relationship with oneself and one has to have
a good relationship with others and with the
environment in order to be “well.” The sales
consultants have excellent relationships with
their clients that go beyond just the sale of
beauty products. Natura reaches its customers
without big fancy stores or attractive ads, relying
instead on people who build relationships and
communicate what Natura is.
In a similar way, OLPC has to think of new ways
to deliver its offering, whether it is a laptop or a
software solution. What are the other channels to
reach the children? Does it have a broader reach?
Can you get the offering to children faster? How
is it going to work?

Are there new offerings that OLPC can
provide?
Bob Hacker, CFO of OLPC Association, notes
that OLPC differentiates itself in two ways
from the competition: the ability to manage
deployments, and Sugar. As mentioned, Sugar
is free software, built to be a collaborative
tool. Communities of developers around the
world tinker with the program, build new ones
and share their progress with each other. As a
result, Sugar has grown beyond the default set of
programs that a child gets in every deployment;
it also runs on other computers besides the XO
laptop. Easily loaded onto a USB drive, a user
can plug into another computer and have Sugar
running in minutes.
OLPC faces new challenges now, as Kane states,
“Are there other ways in which we can utilize
Sugar? Can we sell or distribute Sugar in other
ways and use the profits to distribute more XOs?”
In 2004, IBM sold its PC division, which was
losing profits, to Lenovo, a Chinese company
aiming to go global.44 IBM realized early on
the trends in the industry pointed to a shift
from hardware to software, and IBM decided
to focus its business model on consulting and
software. OLPC has to determine its own new
business model; does OLPC’s value lie in
Sugar and its related applications, rather than
the XO’s hardware? How would OLPC sell a
software offering instead of a hardware and
software package? How would deployments
change, given different hardware platforms?

Sugar is already platform independent and
portable to any