D.LIGHT II: Market Research and Prototyping in Remote Regions. Global Health Innovation Insights Series, Feb 2012.
d.light was founded by a group of four students attending Stanford University. Two MBA candidates, Ned Tozun and Sam Goldman, teamed up with two engineering students, Erica Estrada and Xianyi Wu, in a course called Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, to address the need for safe, affordable lighting designed to fulfill the specific requirements of users in the developing world. Over the span of the two-quarter course, they developed prototypes of portable, solar-powered LED lights fit for use in low-resource settings. 
Within a couple of months, they started field testing their designs in Myanmar and found that the potential demand was not only strong, but overwhelming. “People would actually weep as they talked about how the lights had transformed their lives,” Tozun remembered.5 In one village, the police even confiscated the prototypes for their own use—they needed light too.6 After taking the summer off to complete their respective internships, the team members reunited at Stanford in the Fall and decided to form a company to develop their ideas into a real product.
d.light developed a strategy for market research and prototype testing that balanced fieldwork supervised remotely with primary research personally conducted by team members on the ground. This model enabled the team to save money and remain productive in market research and product development even while based in the U.S.
