Biography

Vijay Govindarajan (VG) is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on strategy and innovation. VG is the Coxe Distinguished Professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. This a Dartmouth-wide chair, the highest distinction awarded to Dartmouth faculty. VG was a former Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School. VG is a Faculty Partner at Mach49, a Silicon Valley incubator. He was the first Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant at General Electric. He worked with GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt to write How GE is Disrupting Itself, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) article that pioneered the concept of reverse innovation – any innovation that is adopted first in the developing world. HBR picked reverse innovation as one of the Great Moments in Management in the Last Century.

VG is a NYT and WSJ bestselling author and a two-time winner of the prestigious McKinsey Award for the best article published in HBR. VG was named by Thinkers 50 as a Top 3 Management Thinker worldwide and received the Breakthrough Innovation Award in 2011. VG was inducted into Thinkers 50 Management Thinkers Hall of Fame and was given the Distinguished Achievement Award for most contributions to the understanding of innovation in 2019. VG has been a select few who received Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Awards in two categories.

Govindarajan has been identified as a leading management thinker by influential publications, including Outstanding Faculty, named by Business Week in its Guide to Best B-Schools; Top Ten Business School Professor in Corporate Executive Education, named by Business Week; Top Five Most Respected Executive Coach on Strategy, rated by Forbes; Rising Super Star, cited by The Economist; and Outstanding Teacher of the Year, voted by MBA students.

Before joining the faculty at Tuck, VG was on the faculties of Harvard Business School, INSEAD (Fontainebleau), and the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad, India).

The recipient of numerous awards for excellence in research, Govindarajan was inducted into the Academy of Management Journals’ Hall of Fame and ranked by Management International Review as one of the Top 20 North American Superstars for strategy research. One of his papers was recognized as one of the ten most-often cited articles in the entire 50-year history of the Academy of Management Journal.

VG is a rare faculty who has published over twenty articles in the top academic journals (Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal) and more than twenty articles in prestigious practitioner journals, including several best-selling HBR articles. He published the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Reverse Innovation. His HBR articles “Engineering Reverse Innovations” and “Stop the Innovation Wars” won McKinsey Awards. His HBR articles “How GE Is Disrupting Itself” and “The CEO’s Role in Business Model Reinvention” are HBR’s all-time Top 50 Best Sellers.

VG has worked with CEOs and top management teams in more than 40% of the Fortune 500 firms to discuss, challenge, and escalate their thinking about strategy. His clients include Boeing, Coca-Cola, Colgate, Deere, FedEx, GE, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, J.P. Morgan Chase, J&J, New York Times, P&G, Sony, and Wal-Mart. He has been a keynote speaker at the BusinessWeek CEO Forum, HSM World Business Forum, TED, and World Economic Forum at Davos.

VG received his doctorate from Harvard Business School and was awarded the Robert Bowne Prize for the best thesis proposal. He also received his MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School. VG received his Chartered Accountancy degree in India and was awarded the President’s Gold Medal for obtaining the first nationwide rank.

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STRATEGY IS INNOVATION

Securing global presence is anything but synonymous with possessing global competitive advantage. Presence in strategically important markets is certainly a precondition for creating global competitive advantage. To convert global presence into global competitive advantage, the company must pursue three value creation opportunities: adapting to local market differences, exploiting economies of global scale, and maximizing the knowledge transfer across borders. Pursuing these value creation opportunities requires the firm to design the right type of organization (in terms of structure, systems, people, process, and culture), an organization that can simultaneously optimize local responsiveness, global scale, and knowledge transfer.

REVERSE INNOVATION

In this Reverse Innovation Module, VG introduces the idea of developing in emerging markets first – instead of scaling down rich-world products – to unlock a world of opportunities for your business. Stemming from a pivotal article in Harvard Business Review, his reverse innovation presentation offers an important next step for companies looking to derive long-term value from emerging markets. According to VG, “Reverse innovation is a potent force that will transform the global economy over the next few decades. It will redistribute power and wealth to countries and companies who understand it and diminish those who do not.”

VG offers a glimpse at strategies from some of the world’s leading companies – from GE and Deere & Company to P&G and PepsiCo. There is no one industry that needs to reverse innovate; instead, all industries must have interest in the needs and opportunities in the developing world in order to thrive in tomorrow’s global marketplace.

INNOVATION EXECUTION: EXECUTING THE BOX 3 STRATEGIES

Implementing Box 3 breakthrough innovation projects is the triple-flip-with-a-quadruple-twist of general management. No matter how talented and experienced the leader, chances are that this is a new and unfamiliar challenge. VG can help you understand the three fundamental challenges faced by Box 3 strategic experiments, and can offer several specific recommendations to help you overcome them.

DELIVERING WORLD-CLASS HEALTHCARE, AFFORDABLY

In this presentation, VG explains how innovative Indian hospitals are delivering high-quality healthcare at prices 95% below American hospitals. Although the context is very different in these two countries, there are lessons that U.S. healthcare leaders can learn and apply.

To provide high-quality care at ultra-low costs, private Indian hospitals have adopted three techniques: 1) hub-and-spoke networks; 2) task shifting; and 3) basic frugality. These approaches enable these hospitals to maximize the number of patients served, while benefiting from economies of scale. In the years ahead, U.S. healthcare providers should learn about and consider adopting these principles as they strive to expand access, improve quality, and reduce costs. If U.S. providers don’t change, they actually risk being disrupted by these efficient, low- cost Indian providers.

THREE-BOX SOLUTION

We now live in an era of constant change, driven by the dynamic forces of technology, globalization, the Internet, changing demographics, and shifting customer preferences. As a result, companies find that their strategies need almost constant redefinition—either because the old assumptions are no longer valid, or because the previous strategy has been imitated and neutralized by competitors. Rooted in these premises, the strategic and organizational challenges become:

• How do we identify the market discontinuities that could transform our industry?
• How can we create new growth platforms that exploit new market realities?
• What are our core competencies and how can we leverage them to generate growth?
• What new core competencies do we need to build?
• What organizational DNA will allow us to anticipate and respond to changes on a continual basis?
• How do we execute breakthrough strategies?

Testimonials

I'd heard that VG is a highly sought-after keynote speaker. I now know why when he addressed our CEO Summit.
– Senior Executive in a Fortune 100 Company
VG shows how to turn breakthrough ideas into breakthrough growth.
– John Menzer, President and CEO, Wal-Mart International
Lessons I learned years ago in his class I still carry today. He is a truly gifted teacher.
– Anil Chitkara, T ’94
VG is a Top Five Executive Coach on Strategy.
– Forbes
VG’s Ten Rules For Strategic Innovators is a Top 10 Recommended Read.
– The Wall Street Journal
Exactly the tools and concepts my company is struggling with! Thanks!
– Seminar Participant
Among the line up of incredible speakers like Jack Welch and Malcom Gladwell, VG was the best.
– Participant in a Major Conference
VG has a great capability to bring complex subjects down to simple bullets/pictorial charts.
– Seminar Paricipant
VG does a terrific job of pinpointing factors to drive sustained results.
– Bob Lane, CEO, John Deere Company
VG’s 3 Box thinking has changed my life.
– Seminar Paricipant

Booksby Vijay Govindarajan

Reverse Innovation in Health Care: How to Make Value-Based Delivery Work

Amazon

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