India Inside: The Emerging Innovation Challenge to the West

Thanks to its ability to innovate, the developed world will always have a distinct advantage over the developing world, right? Not according to leading management experts Nirmalya Kumar and Phanish Puranam. In India Inside, the authors draw on their research to show how India is already turning this assumption on its head-often in ways invisible to consumers in the developed world. Through their research and extensive interviews with India-based executives from such companies as AstraZeneca, GE, Infosys, Intel, and Wipro, the authors unveil the dramatic rise in invisible innovation occurring in India-from B2B products and R&D outsourcing to process and management innovation. The book also illuminates Indian companies' growing ability to innovate consumer products that are compact, low-cost, efficient, and robust in the face of harsh environmental conditions. The authors' analysis makes clear that for certain kinds of innovation, the long-held monopoly of the developed world is over. India Inside provides a wake-up call for executives and policy makers in the developed world and a clear-eyed view of both the challenges and opportunities facing multinationals seeking new sources of innovation in the future.

About the Author
Nirmalya Kumar (Winner: 2011 Thinkers50 Global Village Award) is a professor of marketing at London Business School, where he is also co-director of the Aditya Birla India Center. His work focuses on marketing and the rise of India as an economic force.

Kumar is the author of several books. Marketing as Strategy: Understanding the CEO???s Agenda for Driving Growth and Innovation (2004); Global Marketing (2005); and Private Label Strategy: How to Meet the Store Brand Challenge (2007), focused on marketing strategy, where Kumar is also credited with introducing the concept of "3Vs": valued customer, value proposition and value network.

More recently, he has written about India and its rise to economic superpower status. In India's Global Powerhouses: How They Are Taking on the World (2009), Kumar provides an insider's guide to doing business with Indian leaders and companies.

His latest book is India Inside: The Emerging Innovation Challenge to the West, written with London Business School colleague Phanish Puranam (2011). A keen collector of the work of Indian artist Jamini Roy, Kumar is said to have the largest collection of Roy paintings outside of India.