Results tagged “Jeffrey Immelt” from The Emory Marketing Institute Blog

In “How GE is Disrupting Itself” (October 2009, Harvard Business Review)  GE’s Jeffrey R. Immelt and consultants Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble make some critical observations about global innovation.

GE is disrupting itself, they claim, through reverse innovation.

And according to the GEReports blog, the “disruption” that is at the center of their article can strain companies because reverse innovation requires a decentralized, local-market focus that fundamentally clashes with the centralized, product-focused structure that multinationals have evolved for glocalization. For example, GE’s new handheld electrocardiogram developed for India sells for around $1,000 and the portable, PC-based ultrasound that was designed for China sells for as little as $15,000. The authors note that with these kinds of products, companies like GE are “establishing lower price points, and even using the innovations to cannibalize higher-margin products in rich countries” — which is “antithetical to the glocalization model.”

Professor Govindarajan explains:

Indeed, this is a game-changing approach to innovation for global companies. 

GE is taking a bold step to create products to meet customer needs in developing markets, and then bring the innovation back to the developed countries - the US, Europe, Japan, etc. One can argue that this is being done by necessity, but then why isn’t everyone else doing it?

Hats off to Jeffrey Immelt for his leadership. Let’s see what else they come up with.

More from Vijay Govindarajan here >>