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Companies with global ambitions need to pay close attention to how innovation is achieved in India. In particular, corporate leaders still have much to learn about how this economic powerhouse is likely to develop in the coming decades and what strategy and innovation plays are most likely to be successful.

This “Masterclass” examines the lessons from three important recent books that offer valuable insights on how Indian businesses are addressing the innovation challenge: Conquering the Chaos by Ravi Venkatesan, former Chairman of Cummins India and Microsoft India, identifies the leadership blueprint for creating most value in this and similar emerging “VUCCA” markets. India Inside by Nirmalya Kumar and Phanish Puranam discovers a significant opportunity and challenge – India's rapid emergence as a global hub of innovation. Reverse Innovation by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble presents an alternative strategy to “glocalization” as a more promising way to drive global growth, using emerging markets like India as the innovation platform.

The article looks at why only 25 to 30 of the more than 1,300 major multinationals currently operating in India have made it into the “high-growth trajectory, market leadership” category within that country.

Every company with global ambitions would now be well advised to make to make innovation in India central to their own ambitions, so that they might become the global disruptors of the future not the victims.

While most of today's multinational CEOs see pursuing significant market participation in China as a “no-brainer,” rising, or failing to rise, to the challenge of India, with at least as much urgency and commitment, may turn out to be their most “defining” strategic legacy.

The authors, leading authorities on global innovation, warn that Western companies targeting emerging markets to help drive growth will likely find that the traditional strategy of global localization will prove inadequate. An alternative is their new concept of reverse innovation which this paper aims to introduce.

One example is the portable ultrasound machine developed originally by GE in the early 2000s to meet the particular needs of the Chinese market. Technology advances have since helped propel the growth of a $250 million business opportunity for GE globally, through finding many new applications in the USA and other advanced economies.

Historically, multinationals innovated in rich countries and sold their products in poor countries. Reverse innovation is doing the opposite.

Reverse innovation also highlights the potential for very low price‐point innovations originating in the developing world to generate new market demand back in the richer economies.

Reverse innovations can have global impact. Ultimately, they have the potential to migrate from poor countries to rich ones.

Reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

While many companies find it easy to generate ideas, bringing them to fruition is another matter altogether. That eight out of every ten R&D projects ultimately fail is ample testimony to this fact. And why is this failure rate so high? Many firms concentrate too much on generating ideas and pay little heed to their implementation while, in other cases, it is simply down to bad organization. Companies undoubtedly have the knowledge and ability at their disposal but fail to utilize it properly.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.

The purpose of this paper is to present an interview by Strategy & Leadership with Professor Vijay Govindarajan, one of the world's foremost experts on innovation execution and the co‐author of The Other Side of Innovation (2010), which discusses innovating for emerging markets, building the right innovation team, innovation planning as learning, and his newest concept, emotional infrastructure.

Govindarajan explains how companies use the “forget‐borrow‐learn” framework to drive innovation execution. They “forget” the core business success formula, “borrow” key assets from core business, and “learn” to resolve unknowns.

The paper finds that to manage innovation a special plan should be created to guide disciplined experiments for quicker learning. Quicker learning leads to better decisions, and better decisions lead to better results. A special innovation initiative team should also be created: a partnership between a dedicated team (using a mix of insiders and outsiders, with new job descriptions) and shared staff, who support the project while sustaining its performance engine responsibilities.

Do not “isolate” new businesses or “spin them off.” This forfeits the advantage of using existing assets, such as brands, manufacturing facilities, relationships with customers, areas of technical expertise and much more.

Today reverse innovation, taking unique business models from poor countries to rich ones, is a winning formula. But new organizational systems are required so that full business capabilities for reverse innovation in emerging markets – including product development, manufacturing, and marketing – are possible.

This interview aims to illuminate some of the implementation issues inherent in a new conceptual approach to managing change offered by John P. Kotter. His very promising and compelling idea is a dual operating system, comprised of a traditional management-driven hierarchy focused on delivering day-to-day performance and a strategic accelerator network focused on innovation and agility.

Kotter, a noted change management expert and Harvard professor emeritus, is questioned about his dual operating system concept by veteran strategist and author Brian Leavy.

Looking back, at some stage in almost every corporate history, network and hierarchy will be found to have co-existed symbiotically for some period of time before the traditional tendency for the hierarchy to dominate eventually took over. In effect, the network half of the dual operating system mimics “successful enterprises in their entrepreneurial phase,” where initiatives and sub-initiatives typically “coalesce and disband as needed.”

Kotter’s fieldwork has found that in even the most un-entrepreneurial organizations, there is 5 percent of the workforce that has the energy and desire, if organized correctly, to be an entrepreneurial force.

By asking Kotter some hard questions about implementation, the interview provides executives with a fuller view about how a dual operating system would address change management in their firm.