This dialogue was one of the most powerful explorations of the Purple Economy through lived experience and market failure. It brought together changemakers, industry leaders, corporate representatives and persons with lived experience to examine disability inclusion as an economic force.
Neeraj opened with a personal story about his mother’s difficulty in wearing regular clothing due to a frozen shoulder, making the point that the struggle was not her body it was the market that had not caught up. He connected this to the larger Purple Economy idea through examples like eyeglasses, keyboards, automatic doors and subtitles solutions that began around disability or difficulty and became mainstream conveniences.
Kannan Hariharan’s reflections as a father of a daughter with Down Syndrome made the market gaps deeply concrete. He spoke about eyewear that did not fit children with flat nose bridges, footwear that did not work for wide feet, clothing that lacked adaptive tailoring, and insurance systems that failed to recognise real lives. Each example showed that unmet needs are not marginal they are markets waiting to be designed.
