Vijay Govindarajan

This post is part of HBR's special issue on failure. This blog was co-authored with Jay F. Terwilliger and Mark H. Sebell, managing partners at Creative Realities, Inc., a Boston-based innovation management collaborative. We use this simple framework to determine the success of an innovative effort. It takes corporate will, a marketplace, and strategic competencies to succeed. In other words, successful innovation requires motive, means, and opportunity. Innovation efforts fail anytime they fail to deliver... More »

This post is part of HBR's special issue on failure. This post was written with Mark Sebell and Jay Terwilliger, managing partners at Creative Realities, Inc. a Boston-based innovation management collaborative. There are three variables in the innovation equation: Innovation = ƒ(Strategy + Creativity + Execution) The need to experiment and fail inexpensively in Execution is where most of the focus is these days. Ironically, the relatively low risk and low cost of experimenting with... More »

The number of automobile owners in India will rise rapidly over the next few years as the middle class continues to grow by leaps and bounds. As that market grows, so will the need for legislation around emissions testing, fuel economy standards, and so on. The new legislation will, in turn, create a need for testing services. AVL List GmbH is the world's largest privately owned company specializing in testing and calibration of this kind.... More »

Editor's Note: This post was written with Justin Chakma, an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto (Canada). Venture capitalists are increasingly interested in emerging markets, and in working with local funds based in those markets (despite the fact that reverse innovation in venture capital seems counterintuitive). The reason for the interest in in part because the industry has suffered from poor returns on investment over the last decade; indeed, some sectors, including biotechnology, report... More »

I was a panelist on a session on Reverse Innovation during the recently concluded World Economic Forum at Davos. The session attracted over 125 CEOs and senior executives. The conventional wisdom is that innovations originate in rich countries and the resulting products are sold horizontally in other developed countries and then sent downhill to developing countries. After all, aren't developed nations such as the U.S. and Germany the richest and most technologically advanced nations in... More »

The U.S. government will spend more than $25 billion on health-care-related IT as part of the health care reform bill passed by Congress in March of 2010. The goal is to help make the extraordinarily complicated, fragmented U.S. health care system more interconnected and efficient. Where should they look for ideas? Poor countries, surprisingly enough. Driven by extreme need, emerging-market countries are inventing new ways to use information technology to improve health care delivery —... More »

Editor's note: This blog was written with Madhu Viswanathan, Professor of Business Administration at University of Illinois at Champaign, Illinois. The phrase "marketplace literacy" refers to the skills, self-confidence, and awareness of rights that both entrepreneurs and consumers need to be competent in in a business setting. It's also the name of a program designed to provide those skills. The idea of providing training in marketplace literacy started in subsistence contexts in urban and rural... More »

Editor's Note: This blog was written with Kartik Vittal, a student with the master of engineering management program at Dartmouth College. India has a whopping 60 million senior citizens, even though it's a young country overall. (That 60 million represents only 5% of the population.) Providing those seniors with good health care is a growing problem. This is partly because of changes in the family structure — the "joint family system" under which extended Hindu... More »

Editor's Note: This blog was written with Nitin Sharma, a first-year MBA student at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. The mobile phone industry, highly innovative from the beginning, periodically gets shaken up by a company that changes the rules of the game. Apple did it with the iPhone. Google did it with the release of the Android open-source mobile operating system. And MediaTek, a Taiwan-based semi-conductor company, has done the same thing, but... More »

The $300 House: The Financial Challenge The Design Challenge The Energy Challenge The Co-Creation Challenge The Marketing Challenge The Performance Challenge The Corporate Challenge The Sustainability Challenge The Urban Challenge Editor's note: This post was written with Christian Sarkar, a marketing consultant who also works on environmental issues. David A. Smith, the founder of the Affordable Housing Institute (AHI) tells us that "markets alone will never satisfactorily house a nation's poorest citizens...whether people buy or... More »

Conventional wisdom suggests you should isolate innovation from the core — separate the new from the old. But this approach misses the important advantage that big corporations can bring to innovation. Global companies own mammoth assets and capabilities that innovation initiatives must leverage. GE Healthcare in India innovated a $400 portable ECG machine by leveraging GE's vast reservoir of knowledge about ECG technologies that reside in their R&D; center in Milwaukee. Based on our research... More »

For the past ten years, my colleague, Chris Trimble, and I have studied one critical question: What are the best practices for executing an innovation initiative? Execution is the poor stepchild of the innovation challenge. People love to engage in the hunt for the big ideas, but, let's face it, without execution capability, an idea on paper is....just an idea on paper. Having conducted research in more than 25 of the Fortune 500 companies, including... More »

My colleague Chris Trimble and I have polled hundreds of managers, asking them to define innovation. Usually, managers equate innovation with creativity. But innovation is not creativity. Creativity is about coming up with the big idea. Innovation is about executing the idea — converting the idea into a successful business. We like to think of an organization's capacity for innovation as creativity multiplied by execution. We use "multiplication" rather than "sum" because, if either creativity... More »