Looking for new ideas? Get yourself to the developing world
(Read article summary)From jeans to medical devices, products from India and China are disrupting markets in the West.
Could the next big breakthrough in medicine or technology come from the developing world?
We Americans may think of poorer nations as hotbeds of war and disease, a place to send our charity checks. But emerging economies are actually an invaluable breeding ground for innovations that could change lives in the United States.
In a process known as “reverse innovation,” multinational corporations are rolling out cheap, easy-to-use products in Africa, India, and China and then bringing them “home” to Western markets.
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Examples of reverse innovation range from the prosaic – low-cost Levi’s jeans that debuted in China and hit American stores last spring – to the revolutionary: a portable, seven-pound heart monitor developed by General Electric engineers in Bangalore, India.
Chris Trimble is an adjunct professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and has written an influential book on reverse innovation with his “super star” (according to The Economist) colleague Vijay Govindarajan.
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