The Innovation Strategy Most Companies Miss

And I'm Adi Ignatius and this is the HBR Idea Cast. Today, we're focusing on how to create products and services with widespread global appeal. But let me start with a question for you. If you wanted to make something that would be popular around the world, where would you start? Well, I guess the obvious example is look for products and services that are successful in one market and try to adapt them to other ones. Like Coca Cola in different sizes and levels of sweetness, or Nike running shoes with lighter mesh or a more basic iPhone. Yeah, I mean they all seem to be doing pretty well. Yes, they are. But our guests today say that a lot of companies actually fail when they try to adapt goods in this way. And there might be more value in taking a different approach.

Amos Winter, professor at MIT, and V. J. Cavinderan, professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, argue that there's an advantage to tackling international markets first, using innovation to solve the toughest problems most efficiently there, versus starting with offerings for wealthy markets and then watering them down. Winter and Gavidnar, who goes by VG, are authors of the book Global by Design: How to Create Innovations That Scale, Travel, and Transform. Here's our conversation.

Why should leaders today take a global perspective on innovation from the very beginning? I think you can look at it from a a number of opportunity standpoints. One business. The greatest economic growth in the world right now is in emerging markets. And so that in addition to the large populations creates amazing business opportunities. But I think the other opportunity is from a social perspective, all the most compelling issues facing humanity really present most compellingly in low resource settings. you can make that positive humanitarian impact and make a viable business at the same time.

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