Vijay Govindarajan is the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and Director of its Centre for Global Leadership.
You just wrote an article for Harvard Business Review with Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric (GE), and your associate, Chris Trimble. What was it about?
Historically, global companies innovated in their home markets, the developed world, and took those products into developing countries. We wrote about “reverse innovation”, which is just doing the opposite — innovating in emerging markets and then bringing those innovations back into developed countries. That’s the opposite of “glocalization” (a hybrid word formed by merging global with localization), the big idea in the 1990s, which has been defined as “thinking globally and acting locally”.
And once they do?