Reverse innovation

Innovating from less to more developed markets

In multinational corporations, marketers in emerging markets typically have much more limited resources than their colleagues in the more developed markets. They are forced to solve their challenges more innovatively and experiment with new, unique customer and business solutions.

As teams in emerging countries are much smaller than those in large western countries, marketers meet more frequently with other employees and innovators to ideate and to share learnings fast. Small markets also offer an excellent testbed for innovations, as failures have limited impact on the overall organization. There are numerous types of small markets and very diverse combinations of talent. Experimentation is also somewhat easier in these markets because they are geographically further removed from controlling corporate headquarters.

Once innovations succeed in emerging markets, corporations contain the perfect structure to scale those innovations to other, including the more developed, markets.

• A country manager in an African country faced a challenge of ensuring safe and inexpensive delivery of life saving medicines to remote areas. Cold chain requirements made long term storage in the target areas problematic. Regular trucks faced challenges ranging from broken roads to bandit attacks, making the transport of medicines expensive, slow and risky. Drones provided an innovative solution: cheap(er), fast and secure.
• A Southern European and a Japanese marketer in the same company were inspired by this capability of drones to address one of their challenges: delivering medicine to victims of regularly occurring earthquakes.
• Same concept: reach remote customers with urgently needed medicines. This innovation was created in an emerging market and “reverse innovated” to developed markets.

After the fact, this reverse innovation seems logical. But it only happened because of a few critical steps. The initial innovator had to overcome local barriers, like regulatory constraints and supply chain resistance. The global Innovation Leader needed to be aware of this innovation and discuss it at the right time with the right colleagues. These colleagues needed to have an open mindset to accept ideas from another “less sophisticated” market and translate the value to their situation.

The three innovators continued to collaborate, share learnings and find new applications for this technology.

As E.F. Schumacher said:

”“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.”

So, as Innovation Leader, I made sure to continuously connect with open minded country innovators across the globe. These innovators shared their innovative solutions (even failed ones) with their colleagues. These inspirational discussions triggered new applications and innovations.

More reading: Jugaad Innovationby Jaideep Prabhu, Navi Radjou, and Simone Ahuja

Do you have any similar experiences? Please share below!!