Reverse Innovation

Reverse innovation is a term referring to an innovation seen first or likely to be used first, in the developing world before spreading to the industrialized world. Reverse innovation refers broadly to the process whereby goods developed as inexpensive models to meet the needs of developing nations, such as battery-operated medical instruments in countries with limited infrastructure, are then repackaged as low-cost innovative goods for Western buyers.

The process of reverse innovation begins by focusing on needs and requirements for low-cost products in countries like India and China. Once products are developed for these markets, they are then sold elsewhere - even in the West - at low prices which create new markets and uses for these innovations.

Typically, companies start their globalization efforts by removing expensive features from their established product, and attempt to sell these de-featured products in the developing world. This approach, unfortunately, is not very competitive, and targets only the most affluent segments of society in these developing countries. Reverse innovation, on the other hand, leads to products which are created locally in developing countries, tested in local markets, and, if successful, then upgraded for sale and delivery in the developed world.

The reality is, developing countries are not following the same path and could actually go ahead of developed countries because of their willingness to adopt breakthrough technologies. With smaller per capita incomes, developing countries are more than happy with hi-tech solutions that deliver decent performance at a comparatively low cost - a 50% solution at a 15% cost.

Examples of reverse innovation can be found across various industries and geographies.

(Reference: Wikipedia and Docstoc)
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Ideation

Ideation is the process of creating new ideas and there are hundreds of techniques for generating ideas. ‘Idea’ is understood as a basic element of thought that can be visual, concrete or abstract. Several large companies, like Dell or Best Buy, have opened up this process to their consumers, inviting anyone to raise new ideas for possible company products. Everyone realises the importance of innovation as a key driver of business success and posits new ways to encourage and nurture it in today’s business environment.

Ideas are the bedrock foundations of companies. Great companies lead with great ideas, but the big question is 'how do great companies develop those ideas?' To have a shot at success, an idea needs to fulfill a need, and it needs to be backed by the technology that can make it happen. The purpose of any new idea is to show value and benefits. Any idea which at an early stage suggests large benefits is always worth hearing and pursuing. The benefits must, however, be made very clear.

There should be a process to make this happen....which is not easy and also not that difficult.
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The Decade in Management Ideas from Harvard Business Review

Tis the season for "year's best" lists — and even, this year, for "decade's best" lists. A few of HBR editors (Gardiner Morse and Steve Prokesch) took the opportunity to look back on the past ten years of management thinking and are ready to declare the choices for the — well, why not say it — most influential management ideas of the millennium (so far).

1. Shareholder Value as a Strategy - The notion of producing attractive returns for investors is as old as investing, but this was a decade when the pursuit of shareholder value eclipsed too much else. Increasingly sophisticated tools and metrics for value-based management pushed the consideration of stock price effects deep into operational decision-making, and made sure everything pointed toward bonus day. By 2009, even the man most known for focusing on value was saying it was a dumb idea. "Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy," Jack Welch proclaimed. "Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products."

2. IT as a Utility - The current mania for cloud computing is the latest step in a long process by which enterprises have dispensed with their proprietary glass houses and begun buying computing capabilities as services. One impetus was the Y2K scare, which forced attention onto those onerous legacy systems as the new millennium dawned.

3. The Customer Chorus - Through a range of technical and social developments, customers' voices grew louder (whether collectively in ratings systems like Amazon's, or individually through viral kvetches like Dave Carroll's "United Breaks Guitars") and companies found ways to listen. It's a true megatrend: the steps along the way have felt gradual and natural, but collectively they change everything.

4. Enterprise Risk Management - Sounds crazy right now to say that the last decade was notable for risk management. But especially after 9/11, companies saw the sense of bringing the many and various pockets of it under the same umbrella. Newly empowered chief risk officers looked for trouble spots on a landscape ranging from financial hedging to pirates on the open sea.

5. The Creative Organization - The decade saw a general revolution in the way many organizations came to view their source of competitive advantage, and a commitment to finding ways to produce creative output more reliably. Even before they embraced "design thinking," managers were encouraging collaboration, drawing on diverse perspectives, and engaging whole workforces in "ideation."

6. Open Source - Purist geeks will be quick to point out that the term open source and some very substantial achievements came in the late 1990s, but here we pay homage to the spread of that model beyond software code. Was it only in 2001 that Wikipedia was born? And how many things have been wiki'ed since?

7. Going Private - Cheap debt reignited the LBO scene just as post-Enron reforms created real disincentives to operate as a public company. As the decade wore on, private equity's playbook for turning around businesses was increasingly held up as best-practice management. Now, ideas like, ahem, leveraging up don't seem so wise, but private equity's devotion to strategic focus and demanding governance might endure.

8. Behavioral Economics - Okay, by now, you're all shouting "that's definitely older than 10 years" and you're right. But talk about a set of ideas whose time has come. In the prior decade, can you remember when someone with Steven Levitt's profile had a breakout bestseller? Or when someone modifying the word economist with "rogue" (or "rock star") could keep a straight face?

9. High Potentials - Consulting firms and other deeply knowledge-based businesses knew this all along, but in the past decade the rest of the corporate world woke up to the fact that some managers are more equal than others. Formal programs were established to identify, cultivate, and retain "hi-po's". Executive coaching, a perk often provided for the anointed, experienced explosive growth as an industry.

10. Competing on Analytics - Decades of investment in systems capturing transactions and feedback finally yielded a toolkit for turning all that data into intelligence. Operations research types, long consigned to engineering realms like manufacturing scheduling, got involved in marketing decisions. Managers started learning from experiments that were worthy of the name.

11. Reverse Innovation - The bigger story here is the maturation of the concept of globalization, particularly with regard to emerging economies. Most big corporations in 2000 saw them primarily as a source of natural resources and, increasingly, cheap labor. Then, as rising employment fueled the development of middle classes, cities in India and China came to represent valuable markets. Now, these non-US consumers are coming to the foreground. Firms like GE and Microsoft are doing R&D in emerging markets, optimizing on those preferences and constraints, and then bringing the results back home.

12. Sustainability - More than anything, the first ten years of the 21st century will be remembered as the decade that businesses went green — if only in their marketing to a public highly attuned to Al Gore's inconvenient truth. We're not cynical on this point, however. The efforts we see by companies large and small to reduce their carbon footprints and other environmental impacts are sincere and effective, as far as they go. But ten years from now, as we revisit this exercise, forgive us if we declare 2010-2020 to be the decade of sustainability. "The idea was in the air before 2010," we can picture ourselves writing. "But this was the decade when it really took hold."
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Significance of sensorial practice in branding

Today, the world has stirred to go from an industrially obsessed economy to a people-driven economy that places the customer as the king. Each foremost brand is going ahead to sell life style perception in run to race in another way. They understand that the new market prospects are not based on compressing costs and rising profits but are in novel deliberation. Inspiring and novel views are now surpassing resources as the main principal of development. The accomplishment is actually done by accepting people’s emotional requirements and it is achieved by emotional branding.

Due to application of emotional branding with your products the brand consist with its long-term value. It is all regarding to sensorial feelings. The appearance of the six senses cannot be ignored in the business environment.

E-Retailing

Today, shoppers’ tendency to buy things has changed to exploring product facts online and then buying offline. Since shoppers grow to be convenient combining in store, catalogue and Internet shopping experiences, retailers must flawlessly incorporate those channels or be prepared to lose the string of their purse in proportion to more alert rivals.

The Online Retailing story tells that the Internet is playing a key role in revolutionising the shopping experience in many ways – on and offline.

With the help of Internet, customers have enabled themselves and given themselves the understanding to evaluate old items, find new ones, communicate with other shoppers and even find low-cost items, and for all these they don’t take pains to walk to a store near to their residence.

The fast going and growing world with on-the-click-shopping forces retailers to design new policies for capturing customers. To attract fresh consumers and to keep and redouble rapport with old ones, retailers have to satisfy customers. For this every retailer has to acquire a level of organisational and technological integration that new researches point out.
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B2B for Apparel Retailers

I am from B2B industry so thought of sharing this interesting topic of ‘B2B for Apparel Retailers’ which I read sometime back published in McKinsey Quarterly.

B2B marketplaces are exploding onto the scene, signaling a transformation of the procurement landscape. This expansion is producing a land grab by new entrants who seek to revolutionize supply chains and by incumbents who are determined to halt disintermediation.

The retail industry is no stranger to these trends – more and more apparel segment business-to-business (B2B) marketplaces have emerged in recent years. In response, both retailers and branded manufacturers are scrambling to determine what procurement or supply-chain benefits marketplaces are offering and how they can capture those benefits.

Apparel retailers and branded manufacturers can gain significant value from employing the right combination of B2B marketplaces. The opportunity to increase earnings could range to 70 percent over time for some apparel retailers and brands. This opportunity reflects the sector’s historically slim net margins and the critical importance of supply-chain efficiencies to margins. The magnitude of the opportunity will depend on an apparel retailer or branded manufacturer’s sophistication, scale, automation, and degree of collaboration with suppliers.
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Making Highly Productive Team

For the world-class results in corporate environment, you have to build an enhanced team to face the challenges in a world of cut-throat competition. In current scenario high competitiveness is found in all business, so it is essential to focus on best activity of team building. It has been witnessed that joint efforts has always attained and generated better results.

If the team is appropriately trained, then teamwork will positively get triumph in all the industry functions. Winning team synergistically harness their members' talents and energy, to make 1 plus 1 equals to at least 3 (or often much more). In short, when a team is working well, the total is far greater than the sum of its parts.

To achieve a common goal of success, it is mandatory to adapt such process. It is fact that team-building activity has to be conducted for increasing the skills of team members and to sharpen their communication ability.

At every place of working, usually people discuss about team building, experiencing as a team member etc. However, very few are there who know about creating better team work experience or how to make-out productive. Being a member of a team is just part of something biggest than an individual. Team building is much to do with knowing of the company’s objectives or goals.

In a team oriented atmosphere, an individual contributes to the whole success of the company, and works with other team members to attain the objectives. Although an individual is concerned with a specific task and to a particular department, he has to unify with other team members from different departments to achieve overall targets.

One has to find out overall functions of teamwork since the task of creating an enhanced team to achieve a specific target. If the team enhancement actions are not matching up to the set target, then self-analysis would be helpful to tell you “why”?
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