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This chapter proposes frugal eco-innovation as an eco-efficient way into which firms might shift their existing business models, exploring how firms are able to cut costs and reduce negative environmental impacts simultaneously.

This work introduces the concept of frugal eco-innovation based on numerous examples about how several European companies are adopting this management perspective. These examples are obtained from these companies’ public environmental reports.

A summary of how cost reduction could be achieved by firms on the basis of frugal eco-innovation; further, the pathway for how managers could achieve an effective implementation of frugal eco-innovation.

By developing frugal eco-innovation, managers are able to benefit from a management alternative that is ecologically sustainable and economically profitable.

This work highlights how frugal eco-innovation could benefit, on the one hand, firms via the achievement of cost reduction and, on the other hand, the society in general via the diminution of the negative environmental impacts generated by the business activity.

This work analyses a management orientation that could be implemented in order to shift business models towards a more ecological production, highlighting how firms are able to do more with less.

The purpose of this paper is to look at the views of Vijay Govindarajan on innovation and corporate strategy for its implementation, Earl C Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at the Tuck School and founding director of Tuck's Centre for Global Leadership and an expert on strategy and innovation.

The paper takes the form of an interview with Vijay Govindarajan.

The paper reveals Vijay Govindarajan's views on innovation and its implementation within the company and his five barriers to breakthrough innovation.

The paper provides insights on corporate strategy for innovation from an established expert on strategy and innovation.

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 paper focuses on the concept of fit as a topic of research. The concept of fit has been viewed as an internal consistency among key strategic decisions or the alignment between strategic choices and critical contingencies with the environment (external), organization (internal), or both (external and internal). A number of research perspectives or approaches related to fit are presented.Research design problems are discussed: definition of terms, theoretical issues, and empirical issues. Emphasis is on how key variables or dimensions of fit are defined and measured in research.

A six-celled matrix is proposed as a conceptual scheme to distinguish different perspectives of fit and to portray congruence relationships more accurately. The matrix includes three common dimensions: strategy, organization, and environment. The matrix also suggests two levels of strategy—corporate or business—and three domains of fit—external, internal, or integrated. These suggest different research perspectives for the study of fit. Examples from the literature are provided to illustrate and support this conceptual scheme. Finally, implications for management and furtherstudy are outlined.

The challenge of sustaining growth seems to be getting steeper and steeper. This Masterclass provides context for two recent books that have valuable insights to offer to company leaders and strategists on how to build resilience and sustain growth in increasingly dynamic and uncertain global competitive markets.

In The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth (2016), well-known Bain strategy consultants, Chris Zook and James Allen offer a strategy for consciously embedding “the founder’s mentality” into the culture of young firms as they scale or rediscovering it in mature firms that might be stalling and losing their way. For strategy and innovation guru, Vijay Govindarajan, sustaining growth increasingly requires being able to pursue simultaneously two very different types of activity and mindset – exploiting a legacy business while exploring new business opportunities. He offers a very practical framework for approaching this challenge in The Three Box Solution: A Strategy for Leading Innovation.

The “founder’s mentality” refers to “a collection of specific behaviors and attitudes best exemplified by the traits of great founders that if properly cultivated in the rest of the organization, can lead more reliably to sustainable growth.” Some young firms fail to establish a founder’s mentality from the outset, while many mature founder-led companies come to lose their sense of insurgency and other key founder’s mentality traits over time. “Just about every company, at any stage in its life, can benefit from the attitudes and behaviors that make up the founder’s mentality.”

Govindarajan argues that “asking what assumptions must be true for this idea to be highly profitable” and testing the most critical of these “as early and as inexpensively as possible” is ‘the best way to reveal an ill-conceived project.

The two books, taken together, provide a wealth of insight for leaders seeking to diagnose their firm’s growth problems and looking for potential solutions for reviving innovation and growth.

Professor Vijay Govindarajan’s “Three Box Solution” framework provides a useful way of looking at a transformative business innovation initiative started at General Motors almost three decades ago and now being further developed by its current CEO Mary Barra.

Drawing on 18 years of experience at GM the author offers insights into how the company used the “Three Box” aproach: 10;•9;Box 1: Strengthen the core. 10;•9;Box 2: Let go of the practices that drive the core business but hinder the new one. 10;•9;Box 3: Invented a new business model. 10;

GM management found creative ways to enable the current business to thrive while exploring the potential market for a visionary business model.

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Based on actual experience of participating in strategy development this paper should help decision makers address their current actions and future strategies simultaneously.

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.

This masterclass examines how two important new books propose to achieve cost innovation, a value creation strategy that can transform an over-priced industry.

In their book, marketing gurus Stephen Wunker and Jennifer Luo Law highlight the potential of cost innovation in helping to create new market demand and transform the competitive dynamics in any industry sector, and they offer guidance on how to develop such a strategy. In their study of transformation by value creation, Professors Vijay Govindarajan and Ravi Ramamurti highlight the potential for cost innovations in emerging markets to help transform health care delivery in the West.

The authors showcased in this masterclass demonstrate how the value-based principles highlighted by Porter and Christensen and Kim and Mauborge are key to transforming any industry to make it more reliable, accessible and affordable.

Cost innovation involves taking a fresh approach to the conventional way of delivering value in any given industry and looking for ways to reimagine it.

The notion of cost as a potential target for breakthrough innovation in its own right is still not widely recognized. As marketing consultants Wunker and Luo Law point out in Costovation: innovation and cost are still most often seen as “magnetic opposites,” the one in natural tension with the other. They set out to challenge this assumption and show how “innovation and cost-cutting” can become “a powerful duo, capable of reshaping markets and creating long-term competitive advantages.”

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.