A conversation with Dartmouth’s Vijay Govindarajan and MIT’s Amos Winter on why designing for emerging markets before developed ones can yield benefits.
Companies often build products for wealthy markets first and then try to adapt them for the rest of the world. But according to Dartmouth Tuck professor Vijay Govindarajan and MIT professor Amos Winter, designing for the toughest constraints first—whether that’s affordability, portability, or limited infrastructure—can lead to products that perform better everywhere. They explain how leaders can identify high-impact opportunities, uncover customer needs through deep field research, and design solutions that balance performance with cost. They also discuss why organizational mindset—not technology—is often the biggest obstacle to global innovation, and where AI can (and can’t) accelerate the design process. Together they wrote the book Global by Design: How to Create Innovations That Scale, Travel, and Transform.
ADI IGNATIUS: And I’m Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ALISON BEARD: Adi, today we’re focusing on how to create products and services with widespread global appeal. But let me start with a question for you. If you wanted to make something that would be popular around the world, where would you start?
ADI IGNATIUS: Well, I guess the obvious example is look for products and services that are successful in one market and try to adapt them to other ones.
ALISON BEARD: Like Coca-Cola and different sizes and levels of sweetness or Nike running shoes with lighter mesh or a more basic iPhone?
ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, I mean they all seem to be doing pretty well.
ALISON BEARD: Yes, they are. But our guests today say that a lot of companies actually fail when they try to adapt goods in this way, and there might be more value in taking a different approach. Amos Winter, professor at MIT, and Vijay Govindarajan, professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, argue that there’s an advantage to tackling international markets first, using innovation to solve the toughest problems most efficiently there, versus starting with offerings for wealthy markets and then watering them down.
Winter and Govindarajan, who goes by Vijay, are authors of the book Global by Design: How to Create Innovations That Scale, Travel, and Transform. Here’s our conversation
ALISON BEARD: Why should leaders today take a global perspective on innovation from the very beginning?
AMOS WINTER: Well, I think you can look at it from a number of opportunity standpoints. One, business. The greatest economic growth in the world right now is in emerging markets. And so that, in addition to the large populations, creates amazing business opportunities. But I think the other opportunity is from a social perspective. All the most compelling issues facing humanity really present most compellingly in low resource settings; you can make that positive humanitarian impact and make a viable business at the same time.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. VG, you and a few coauthors introduced the idea of reverse innovation about 15 years ago now, I think. How does this work build on that?
VIJAY GOVINDARAJAN: I would call it reverse innovation 2.0, because the reverse innovation that I pioneered 15 years ago, it was really looking at it from a business strategy point of view. When I accidentally met Amos, I realized reverse innovation has actually two sides. There is a business strategy side, but then there is an engineering side. And I said, wouldn’t it be nice to bring these two perspectives together? That’s what led to global by design.
ALISON BEARD: And you hear the phrase global by design. And the first thought or challenge that comes to my mind is that if you’re trying to design for everyone, for the world, you’re not really designing for anyone. So, how do you address that worry?
AMOS WINTER: Well, a big part of making globally attractive solutions is figuring out what core values are shared across many different markets. So, I suspect people don’t worry about iPhones selling everywhere or Coca-Cola selling everywhere. There’s commonalities between different user groups that you can utilize. And then there’s modifications to products that are relatively small that you can make so they best align with different markets to maybe change price point or change feature set. But that core value that’s universally appreciated still persists between markets.