Reverse Innovation to the Fore in Harvard Business Review Awards

A case study of reverse innovation in action has been adjudged as the best insight into management thinking to appear in the pages of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) over the past year.

The winning article in the annual HBR McKinsey Awards, ‘Engineering Reverse Innovations’, was penned by MIT engineer Amos Winter and Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business where he is known simply as ‘VG’ and held to be the most popular teacher in the MBA program.

Alongside his teaching duties, Govindarajan has had a longstanding interest in the concept of reverse innovation. He has coauthored a book on the subject with a colleague at the Tuck School, Chris Trimble (with whom you can read an interview here) and, in so doing, popularized a term denoting how products created for developing markets can be adapted for developed markets as a form of disruptive innovation. 

‘Engineering Reverse Innovations’ focuses on the progress of an easy-to-build and cheap all-terrain wheelchair that was designed for the developing world yet, with modifications, is now causing a stir in Western markets. Harvard Business Review’s editor in chief, Adi Ignatius, described the article as “a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how to apply the principles of reverse innovation and design thinking.”

HBR award winner and finalists showcase a year in management thinking

The reverse innovation article fended off competition from three articles named as finalists by Harvard Business Review in the magazine’s April edition. 

One describes the recommendations of Harvard Business School (HBS)’s Guhan Subramanian for a complete overhaul of corporate governance that is greatly needed in the author’s eyes. Subramanian is currently the faculty chair for Harvard’s four-year JD/MBA program and teaches on the subjects of negotiations and corporate law.

Another, the work of two Wharton professors, depicts a pathway by which executives can identify and better understand ‘mission-critical’ knowledge: “We contend that in the absence of a clear understanding of the knowledge drivers of an organization’s success, the real value of big data will never materialize,” Martin Ihrig and Ian MacMillan wrote in HBR last year.

The third finalist in the HBR awards was coauthored by an MBA alumnus of Berkeley-Haas, Timothy Morey, and outlines research into the element of trust between companies and the personal data of customers, making a case for organizational transparency. 

Harvard Business Review’s annual awards are designed to showcase outstanding contributions to the magazine’s coverage of management thought and have previously acknowledged some big names in the field, such as Peter Drucker and Clayton Christensen. Its judges this year included faculty attached to leading business schools in the US as well as senior figures at Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Accenture.