The Unsung Builders of Emerging Economies

Based on research by Diana Jue-Rajasingh

Key findings:

• Markets may need to be built from the ground up in countries that lack the markets for distributing certain life-saving products
• Building markets to distribute these products is likely a more scalable and sustainable approach to improving public welfare than dropping them into a community for free.
• Many scholars think of governments and multinational corporations as the main actors behind market-building. But they’re overlooking an important third actor behind this work: the “knowledge intermediary.”

More than two billion people — roughly one-third of the world’s population — cook with heat sources that pollute their households and cause respiratory illness. The World Health Organization estimates that three million people die every year from problems related to cooking on open fires or stoves using fuels like kerosene, wood, crop waste and coal.

The good news is many of these deaths are preventable. Since the 1950s, a product has existed that can cook without yielding as many harmful emissions. It’s called the clean cookstove.

Like many proven technologies that haven’t pervaded their intended markets, clean cookstoves raise some tough questions: How do we get these life-saving tools into wider use? And how can we do it in a way that is financially viable and self-sustaining — not entirely dependent on donations?

In theory, economic markets are meant to match supply with demand. But when it comes to delivering life-saving goods and services, that mechanism often falters. What happens if the demand for something like clean cookstoves exists in a particular region that has no market infrastructure for it? 

When Products Exist but Markets Don’t

Who creates such markets, and how? In a new paper published in Organization Science, Jue-Rajasingh looks beyond the usual suspects — governments and multinational corporations — to study a critical market-building role: the underappreciated, multifaceted actor she calls the “knowledge intermediary.”

“This research highlights that there are critical players doing work in this space that are not companies or governments,” Jue-Rajasingh says. “This opens the door to a third sector.”

In the clean cookstoves space, for example, the main knowledge intermediary is the Clean Cooking Alliance (CCA). (Coincidentally, the CEO is a Rice Business alum.) The CCA is housed within the United Nations but represents a broad coalition of public and private collaborators, including U.S. government agencies, nonprofits like the Shell Foundation and private companies.

Although building knowledge for a new market is costly and complex, Jue-Rajasingh’s findings show why investing in it is essential.

She contrasts the “knowledge-push” model of market-building with the more common “charity-push” approach, where products are simply given away in low-income communities. She argues that the knowledge-based strategy is more likely to produce scalable, sustainable results over the long term.

“The charity-push ignores what people actually want,” Jue-Rajasingh said. “It overlooks the need to build local capacity — whether through businesses, entrepreneurs or supportive policies and norms. You can hand out products, but if nothing is changing on the ground, the impact may be minimal.”

“If a country has only nonprofits and no companies, it won’t generate the full range of activity and momentum the industry needs — and the same is true in reverse.”

The Overlooked Role of Knowledge Intermediaries

Making a market, especially in poor and remote communities, is a complicated and expensive process with complementary components for both supply and demand. 

On the demand side, education is key: Potential customers need to know that an improved product exists and that it’s relevant to them. They also need to know how to correctly use and maintain it. Sometimes financing tools are also part of the equation, to ensure new products are affordable for their target audiences.

On the supply side, distribution networks need to operate dependably to get the products to people who need them. Often, building a new market also calls for government actors to step in, either by taxing certain products differently, helping to promote specific solutions or exempting key product parts from tariffs.

All of this collaborative, educational, market-making work falls under the purview of the knowledge intermediary.

Jue-Rajasingh explains that the effort unfolds in two stages. The first involves a first-order knowledge intermediary — in this case, the CCA — helping launch high-level industry development in a small group of countries (for the CCA, these include Bangladesh, China, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda). At this stage, the intermediary acts as a central hub: gathering and sharing information, brokering partnerships for pilot projects and learning opportunities, and providing resources such as technical assistance, business training, financing and more.

In the second stage, a different set of organizations move to the fore: those that have worked with the main knowledge intermediary in its countries of focus during stage one. Now, those many organizations become second-order knowledge intermediaries, bringing their new market-building knowledge further afield. These second-order knowledge intermediaries are typically existing companies and nonprofits. 

If a first-order knowledge intermediary like the Clean Cooking Alliance represents the hub of a wheel, second-order knowledge intermediaries are the spokes — transmitting knowledge and market capacity into new places.

Hubs and Spokes

To trace the ripple effects of the efforts made by first- and second-order knowledge intermediaries, Jue-Rajasingh conducted interviews and drew archival data from the various second-order organizations that were active in the CCA’s primary countries and beyond. She also leveraged a dataset derived from a CCA partner directory, which comprised 2,371 organizations operating across 113 countries between 2013 and 2019.

The data revealed that, indeed, second-order knowledge intermediaries that connected to the central hub of the CCA did appear to spur more entrepreneurial activity in the countries where they operated, outside of CCA’s geographical focus.

While she had suspected that second-order knowledge intermediary organizations were helping to spread market-building knowledge, she says she was struck by the level of activity she observed: “In the secondary countries, these organizations weren't just trying to sell products — they were working with other organizations to build a market infrastructure,” she says.

Of course, focusing only on market mechanisms to disseminate social solutions can be taken to an extreme, Jue-Rajasingh notes. The approach can overlook people who have very constrained financial resources, for example. Also: Countries with a healthy mix of companies and nonprofits were more likely to build strong markets for clean cookstoves.

“There were some kinds of knowledge and capabilities that companies could take up, and others that nonprofits could,” Jue-Rajasingh explains. “If a country has only nonprofits and no companies, it won’t generate the full range of activity and momentum the industry needs — and the same is true in reverse.”

Written by Katie Gilbert

Jue-Rajasingh, “Second-Order Knowledge Intermediaries and Multi-Country Entrepreneurial Entry into a Nascent Industry.” Organization Science (2025), forthcoming. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.15661