A CASE STUDY ON REVERSE INNOVATION AND INCLUSIVE GROWTH IN EMERGING ECONOMIES (Pages 77-84) by Dr. Dindayal Swain* and Dr. Suprava Sahu** in THE INTERNATIONAL MANAGER / ISSN: 2348-9413 (Online); 2348-9405 (Print)

As the world is shifting its attention from developed economy to emerging economies like India and China due to demographic dividend, large profitable market economy, huge potential for growth, better spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship, both Indian and Western companies are trying to get foothold in emerging markets. Instead of going for custom fitting of the developed world products to local markets, these companies are increasingly developing products from scratch for the local customers. They are adopting frugal and reverse innovations, by developing affordable products and solutions and later on, introducing them to the developed economies. This paper which is using case study approach initially narrates the relevance of frugal and reverse innovation and goes on to describe the practices of a American MNC (GE) and Indian giants like Piramal, Godrej and Narayana Health. This paper concludes as to how companies can achieve sustainable competitive advantage (Johannessen, Olaisen and Olsen, 2001) by serving the bottom of the pyramid through reverse innovation and inclusive growth. As a part of reverse innovation, not to underestimate the path breaking frugal products like Godrej Chotu kool , Piramal Sarvajal and Dr.Devi Shetty’s Narayana Heart Centre at Bangalore.(Govindarajan and Ramamurti, 2011; Hang and Subramanian, 2012; Tiwari and Herstatt, 2012a; Zeschky, Widenmayer and Gassmann, 2011, etc.).This paper focuses on capturing how Indian and Western companies are reaching the bottom of the pyramid (Prahalad and Hart, 2002) in the emerging markets by using reverse innovation and later taking the same to the developed markets. Keywords: reverse innovation; frugal innovation; inclusive growth; emerging economy; bottom of the pyramid.