What Engineering a Reverse Innovation Looks Like

Monthly Report

“What Engineering a Reverse Innovation Looks Like”

The article, “What Engineering a Reverse Innovation Looks Like”, by Amos Winter and Vijay Govindarajan, discusses what businesses should do when they are investigating a new product opportunity, particularly in an emerging market. According to Winter and Govindarajan, the company must define the problem, and requirements independent from what the company is doing now.

One of the challenges to creating products for emerging markets is delivering solutions that, not only offer quality products but are affordable to the majority of the people. One example that was quoted was offering cook-stoves to developing countries; where these cook stoves help prevent harmful emissions of gases; however if the masses don’t cook on stovetops and foresee any value in them then the company has not addressed the core problems and will have difficulty integrating them into this group of people.

The company must determine what technical and socioeconomic requirements are before they can begin to determine what products in their product line they can offer and more important if those products will satisfy the new market. If a company determines that they can satisfy these requirements than they can offer their products, similar to what Procter and Gamble did, and instead of altering the product changed the packaging.

In order to overcome the challenges of emerging markets, designers cannot just adapt they must disrupt. People in developing countries are not satisfied with dirty water, polluted cities and the like, the reason these challenges exist is because no obvious solution exist. It is necessary to find that point where existing technology, performance and price come together and the company introduces/produces a new product.

GE Healthcare has demonstrated this idea that a product must deliver