The Idea in Brief
Affordability and sustainability are replacing premium pricing and abundance as innovation’s drivers, but few executives know how to cope with the shift. Companies must make their offerings accessible to a greater number of people by selling them cheaply and must develop more products and services with fewer resources.
Westerners are struggling to tackle this challenge, but some enterprises in developing countries, particularly in India, are showing the way by practicing three types of “Gandhian innovation”:
- disrupting business models
- modifying organizational capabilities
- creating or sourcing new capabilities
Companies anywhere in the world can follow suit by striving for inclusive growth, establishing a clear vision, setting stretch targets, exercising entrepreneurial creativity within constraints, and focusing on people, not just profits or shareholder wealth.
Innovation, after vanishing from corporate priorities during the recent recession, is slowly making its way back onto to-do lists in corner offices. In most companies, though, the innovation process is coughing and sputtering like a rusty old engine. Not unlike internal combustion, traditional innovation is heading for obsolescence—because parameters have completely changed—and it will take unsuspecting organizations with it.