Category Archives: Innovation Trends

Next Cradle of Innovation

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Christopher M. Schroeder in his HBR article The Middle East Could Be a Cradle of Innovation quotes the changing scenario in MENA i.e. Middle East and North America region, a case of leap frogging in adapting technology due to lack of baggage of old technology. He specifically quotes the huge penetration of mobile phones and how they are contributing to the economy. How the GDP now passes through mobile phones, how stories are being shared and how probably the content is being consumed.

He further predicts that this region might become the cradle of innovation for the coming times, and just like no one could see the economic rise of countries like Japan and Finland, we are unable to see the rise of Middle East.

I would like to add that innovations and economic dominance moves in circles and between various regions and the time of middle east may be returning. Yes, we should expect some good innovations from them, some of which may be already in use there but unexplored by the rest of the world and some of them may be invented for the rest of the world.

Till then, do you know of any innovations from middle east in last 100 years…

Reverse Innovation

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Vijay Govindarajan in an HBR article ‘How to Build a reverse Innovation’, talks about Stanford University’s BioDesign program, where students are going to developing economies and figuring out how the reverse innovations can be done from there.
Reverse Innovation is nothing but frugal innovation ,where you have rigid constraints like resources and cost and you have to deliver may be 50% of the functionality of a sophisticated product at say 15-20% of the cost of the higher end solution. Most of these innovations have happened based on the ‘Necessity is the mother of Invention’ principle. 
Till now this has happened more to serve the markets that will not be able to afford the full blown solutions. In other words, these were the plain vanilla versions of the solutions that are sold to the richer economies. Now with the world economies moving towards a more equanimous environment, the reverse innovations may become standard solutions.