HBS Professor Teaches Case Study at PSI

For the first time in PSI’s 24-year relationship with Harvard Business School (HBS), the nation’s premier business school came to PSI to teach its new case study on PSI’s safe water program.

The lead author of the study, professor V. Kasturi “Kash” Rangan, led a discussion with forty members of PSI/Washington staff including PSI President Karl Hofmann and Chief Operating Officer Peter Clancy, as well as nine external stakeholders from USAID, Johns Hopkins University, the George Washington University, Water Advocates and the Global Health Council.

HBS published the case study in April 2007 on PSI’s struggles to obtain funding for its point-of-use water purification program in 21 countries. This marks the third HBS case study to focus on PSI programs within five months. The study, titled “PSI: Social Marketing Clean Water,” is described by Harvard Business Online as follows: “Senior management at PSI — arguably the world’s largest and most successful social marketer with impressive achievements in the field of family planning, HIV/AIDS, and malaria prevention — must determine what to do about their slow-to-take-off clean water initiative. PSI’s point-of-use products offered effective protection against water-borne diseases, especially diarrhea, yet the organization found it hard to attract donor funds to sustain the initiative. Its managers must determine how to alter their strategy going forward.”

Written by Rangan, Associate Professor Nava Ashraf and Research Associate Marie Bell, the case study will be taught to first-year marketing students in a class called “Business at the Bottom of the Pyramid.”

— David J. Olson

The case study can be ordered at Harvard Business Online.

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