I started off my career with the largest market research company in India and the principles of marketing and consumer research were imparted to me in the course of working. I picked up a vast quantity of skills and knowledge relating to market segments, USPs, brand loyalities and so on. But with my background in social work and my interest in social change and social equity, I was dissatified and uncomfortable doing that.

I left and joined Development Alternatives in June 1995 all gung-ho about understanding people’s needs, promoting and disseminating an appropriate technology – the micro concrete roofing tile. I thought I knew it all; I did a lot of market research, developed promotional material and, looked at incentives for people to adopt the technology. We did not reach very far. We were dealing with a technology that was new – it was "appropriate" in the sense that it was energy efficient, livlihood creating and not capital intensive. But it became abundantly clear that the technology had to be promoted not the product.

There were dangers of allowing private entrepreneurs to take up the technology indiscriminately : the reduction in quality standards to maximize profits by maximizing the number of tiles sold, by ensuring the maximum cost reduction over its competitors, would result in the corruption of the technology and its ultimate death. (This would not happen in the case of an established product, because the market would ensure quality standards and the preservation of the technology) It was a chicken and egg story – who would take up the technology if the demand for the tile was not assured or at least apparent. The answer again lay in the fact that the product was not actually the tile, - it was the roof and the habitat need. Thus the player was not just the tile maker but also the carpenter (who is the roof builder for a tiled roof), the contractors, the NGOs, the government, the designers of such housing – architects, building centres, and not the least the final user. Each of these groups had a stake in the tile – it’s quality, it’s cost, the quantity and speed of production – all factors to do with marketing of the tile. Hence it made good sense to develop a multi-stakeholder model of marketing or a network of stakeholders in a particular region.

All this was very well as a concept or as a model but this was not the norm for marketing, -these entities, the so called stakeholders had not worked together before. How would they come together? And, how would the work be managed ? Yes, I was excited by the prospects but I also knew that there was a lot that we did not know. So I left DA to take this up as a research study along with Prof.Vijay Padaki who was already interested in the development and management of inter-group/ inter-organisational collaborations for social change.

Three years of studing live case studies and the breadth of available literature, followed by analyses and theory building led to the identification of certain priniples of operation such as the optimization of gains vs the maximization of gains by one at the expense of others, voluntary contractual transations vs self-driven transactions, a multi-point decision making process with mutual accountability vs directive leadership, among others. These findings are available in book published in 2003.*