Social Innovation
Description
My intellectual agenda addresses this question: How to innovate to solve the world’s toughest challenges? Out of the earth’s population, about 2 billion can afford good products whereas the remaining 5 billion are poor and therefore are nonconsumers. Innovating to solve the problems of the 5 billion poor represents a big opportunity for corporations. However, this also presents some of the hardest technical challenges for humanity, where we cannot simply adapt solutions used in wealthy markets. We have to innovate anew. The constraints posed by serving the poor will push innovations towards high-performance low-cost products that have the potential to transform everyone’s life – including customers in rich countries.
My passion for this topic was formed at a very early age. Growing up in India, I realized that India has too many problems but the country has too few resources; the only way India can hope to solve its problems is through innovation. I therefore committed my professional career to research how to make innovations happen. In the first phase of my career, my work was targeted at innovations for America. More recently, I’ve turned attention to the innovation challenges in emerging markets, thanks to an appointment at General Electric in 2008 as their first Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant. I 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.
Building on the foundations of reverse innovation, I am currently involved in three research projects that are focused on applying the best practice management thinking to solve complex and wicked social problems:
- Healthcare Delivery: Study of Indian hospital exemplars that have used management concepts from industrial organizations (economies of scale, specialization, standardization, assembly line, mass production, focused factory, hub and spoke design, etc.) to deliver high quality care at ultra-low costs. One output from this research: “Delivering World Class Healthcare, Affordably”, Harvard Business Review, November 2013 (with Ravi Ramamurti).
- Reach Maximization: How can social sector organizations in fields such as education and healthcare achieve three irreconcilable goals: ultra-low cost, high quality, and extreme reach.
- Constraint-Driven Innovation: Joint research with MIT Engineering Faculty on the engineering and design principles for solving social problems in emerging markets. Constraint-driven innovation will be a catalyst for new ideas and a valuable design tool for engineers striving to create technologies that have global impact.