Vijay Govindarajan
Considered a leading expert on strategy and innovation, pioneered the concept of reverse innovation.
Vijay Govindarajan, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal Best Selling Author, is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on strategy and innovation. VG is the Coxe Distinguished Professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and he was the first Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant at General Electric. He worked with GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt to write “How GE is Disrupting Itself”, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) article that pioneered the concept of reverse innovation – any innovation that is adopted first in the developing world. HBR picked reverse innovation as one of the Great Moments in Management in the Last Century. In VG’s latest book, The Three Box Solution: A Strategy for Leading Innovation, he educates innovation leaders on how to maintain performance requirements of their current business—one that is still thriving—while dramatically reinventing it. In the latest Thinkers 50 Rankings, VG is rated the #1 Indian Management Thinker.
Three-Box Solution
Leaders already know that innovation calls for a different set of activities, skills, methods, metrics, mind-sets, and leadership approaches—it is well-understood that creating a new business and optimizing an already existing one are two fundamentally different management challenges. The real problem for leaders is doing both, simultaneously. How do you meet the performance requirements of the current business—one that is still thriving—while dramatically reinventing it? How do you foresee a change in your current model before a crisis forces you to abandon it?
Vijay expands the leader’s innovation toolkit with a simple and proven method for allocating the organization’s energy, time, and resources—in balanced measure—across what he calls “the three boxes”:
- Box 1: The present—Keep the current business going
- Box 2: The past—Forget what made the business successful in the past
- Box 3: The future—Create the new model
The “three box” framework makes leading innovation easier because it gives leaders a simple vocabulary and set of tools for managing and measuring the different sets of behaviors and activities, across all levels of the organization.
Strategy Is Innovation
We now live in an era of constant change, driven by the dynamic forces of technology, globalization, the Internet, changing demographics, and shifting customer preferences. As a result, companies find that their strategies need almost constant redefinition—either because the old assumptions are no longer valid, or because the previous strategy has been imitated and neutralized by competitors. Rooted in these premises, the strategic and organizational challenges become:
- How do we identify the market discontinuities that could transform our industry?
- How can we create new growth platforms that exploit new market realities?
- What are our core competencies and how can we leverage them to generate growth?
- What new core competencies do we need to build?
- What organizational DNA will allow us to anticipate and respond to changes on a continual basis?
- How do we execute breakthrough strategies?
Innovation Execution
Implementing Box 3 breakthrough innovation projects is the triple-flip-with-a-quadruple-twist of general management. No matter how talented and experienced the leader, chances are that this is a new and unfamiliar challenge. VG can help you understand the three fundamental challenges faced by Box 3 strategic experiments, and can offer several specific recommendations to help you overcome them.
Reverse Innovation
In this presentation, VG introduces the idea of developing new business models in emerging markets first – instead of scaling down rich-world products – to unlock a world of opportunities for your business. Stemming from a pivotal article in Harvard Business Review, his reverse innovation presentation offers an important next step for companies looking to derive long-term value from emerging markets. According to VG, “Reverse innovation is a potent force that will transform the global economy over the next few decades. It will redistribute power and wealth to countries and companies who understand it and diminish those who do not.”
VG offers a glimpse at strategies from some of the world’s leading companies – from GE and Deere & Company to P&G and PepsiCo. There is no one industry that needs to reverse innovate; instead, all industries must have interest in the needs and opportunities in the developing world in order to thrive in tomorrow’s global marketplace.
Delivering World-class Healthcare, Affordably
In this presentation, VG explains how innovative Indian hospitals are delivering high-quality healthcare at prices 95% below American hospitals. Although the context is very different in these two countries, there are lessons that U.S. healthcare leaders can learn and apply.
To provide high-quality care at ultra-low costs, private Indian hospitals have adopted three techniques: 1) hub-and-spoke networks; 2) task shifting; and 3) basic frugality. These approaches enable these hospitals to maximize the number of patients served, while benefiting from economies of scale. In the years ahead, U.S. healthcare providers should learn about andconsider adopting these principles as they strive to expand access, improve quality, and reduce costs. If U.S. providers don’t change, they actually risk being disrupted by these efficient, low- cost Indian providers.
