Just finished reading the book "Reverse Innovation".
Congratulations to Professors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble for this scholarly work.
Reading is my passion and this book ranks among the best books that I have read.
In the years to come, this is going to be a veritable bible for students and practitioners alike.
In addition to understanding the new concept of Reverse Innovation, my learnings include the following:
1) Best practices for new product development: The Chapters on Harman and John Deere explained clearly approaches to new product development, that could be used in any context, not necessarily in reverse innovation. (In a lighter vein, the Chapter on John Deere appeared like a thriller to me and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it). John Deere's innovation exercise is a reminder to all companies that "one size fits all" is not the right approach. Being humble and studying your competitor's product thoroughly is another take away from the Harman case study.
2) Best practices for new business group incubation: Chapter 4 on Local Gowth Teams (LGTs) gives guidelines how companies can incubate new business groups to fuel organic growth. I found a lot of synergy between these concepts and the ones presented in Jack Welch's book titled "Winning".
Reading is my passion and this book ranks among the best books that I have read.
In the years to come, this is going to be a veritable bible for students and practitioners alike.
In addition to understanding the new concept of Reverse Innovation, my learnings include the following:
1) Best practices for new product development: The Chapters on Harman and John Deere explained clearly approaches to new product development, that could be used in any context, not necessarily in reverse innovation. (In a lighter vein, the Chapter on John Deere appeared like a thriller to me and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it). John Deere's innovation exercise is a reminder to all companies that "one size fits all" is not the right approach. Being humble and studying your competitor's product thoroughly is another take away from the Harman case study.
2) Best practices for new business group incubation: Chapter 4 on Local Gowth Teams (LGTs) gives guidelines how companies can incubate new business groups to fuel organic growth. I found a lot of synergy between these concepts and the ones presented in Jack Welch's book titled "Winning".
(Chapter titled Organic Growth in Welch's book).
3) The flip side of the "Dominant Logic": In my own experience, I have seen organizations falling victim to the dominant logic. If a company is a leader in a certain space, it tries to develop new generation products better than its own previous generation products, oblivious of the fact that a new player would have changed the benchmarks.
3) The flip side of the "Dominant Logic": In my own experience, I have seen organizations falling victim to the dominant logic. If a company is a leader in a certain space, it tries to develop new generation products better than its own previous generation products, oblivious of the fact that a new player would have changed the benchmarks.
In the semiconductor space, the emergence of Chinese players like Mediatek is a reminder to the larger US/European semiconductor companies to relook at their emerging market strategies. The same holds true for the networking/telecom space where Huawei and ZTE are challenging traditional market leaders not only in Asia, but in the developed world as well.
Some thoughts on Indian products that would have become much more successful had they been incubated in the LGTs of large corporations: (With due respect to the Indian companies that made these possible)
1) Reva electric car - Had a GM/Suzuki/Ford India team done this, it would have been much more successful, since it could have leveraged the vast manufacturing, marketing and channel resources of these giants.
2) Aakash Tablet - The much hyped $35 tablet planned by the MHRD, government of India would have lived upto its hype if it was conceived in the LGT of a worthy product company like a Dell or Nokia than the inexperienced Datawind.
3) Solar-powered Cellular base stations - A lesser known company called Vihaan Networks has been actively involved in commercializing solar powered cellular base stations. In a power starved country like India and in many African countries this would have been a bestseller. But, wireless nfrastructure equipments are very complex beasts to build from scratch. Had a Motorola/Nokia-Siemens LGT invested in such a relevant technology, this would have seen much wider success. Eventually, this would even have entered the developed world since low Opex is every telco's dream.
Many India design centers of global corporations have proposed and implemented products tailor made for India/China following this paradigm. They have achieved varying degrees of success. The book highlights the case study of GE Healthcare's Portable ECG machine. In general, the biggest barrier for a headquarters-based business leader to approve a proposal emanating from the Indian design center is that the size of the opportunity might appear small in comparison to the overall business size. But the word of caution here is that there is probably a Chinese product company in waiting to grab this opportunity.
In all, "Reverse Innovation" is a great concept and Prof VG's book is a great guide for putting it to practice.
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