Innovation's Holy Grail

Affordability and sustainability, not premium pricing and abundance, are the new tenets of effective innovation. Westerners are struggling with the shift in mind-set, but a few emerging-market pioneers are showing the way: They're designing inexpensive products and manufacturing them with so little capital and on a scale so vast that their prices-1 cent for a one-minute telephone call, $2,000 for a car are the lowest in the world. Nowhere is this approach, which the authors call "Gandhian innovation," more evident than in India. Smart companies have used it to penetrate the country's burgeoning mass market. This article provides a framework to help executives understand three types of Gandhian innovation that have brought corporations success: disrupting business models, as Bharti Airtel did when it shifted its focus from average revenue per user to gross profit and expanded its market reach; modifying existing business capabilities, as Computational Research Laboratories did when it came up with a whole new supercomputer design that used standard components; and creating or sourcing new capabilities, as Lupin did when it reversed the usual drug development process to create an affordable treatment for psoriasis.