Vijay Govindarajan

International Expert on Business Strategy and Innovation

Vijay Govindarajan, known as VG, is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on strategy and innovation. VG, NYT and WSJ Best Selling author, is the Coxe Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business and the Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School. The Coxe Distinguished Professorship is a new Dartmouth-wide faculty chair. He was the first Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant at General Electric. Prior to joining the faculty at Tuck, VG was on the faculties of Harvard Business School, INSEAD (Fontainebleau) and the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad, India).

Publications

VG writes about innovation and execution on several platforms including Harvard Business Review and Bloomberg BusinessWeek. 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. In the latest Thinkers 50 Rankings, Govindarajan was ranked the #1 Indian Management Thinker.

Accolades

Vijay 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; Top 50 Management Thinker, named by The London Times; Rising Super Star, cited by The Economist; Outstanding Teacher of the Year, voted by MBA students.

Thinkers 50

VG was named by Thinkers 50 as a Top 3 Management Thinker in the world 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 is the only recipient of Distinguished Achievement Awards in two different categories from Thinkers 50.

Awards

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 research in strategy and organization. One of his papers was recognized as one of the ten most-often cited articles in the entire 40-year history of Academy of Management Journal. He is a co-leader of a global initiative to design a $300 House.

Author

VG is a rare faculty who has published more than ten articles in the top academic journals (Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal) and more than ten articles in prestigious practitioner journals including several best-selling HBR articles. He received the McKinsey Award for the best article in HBR. He published the New York Times and Wall Street Journal Best Seller, Reverse Innovation.His latest book is Reverse Innovation in Health Care: How to Make Value-Based Delivery Work.

Clients

VG has worked with CEOs and top management teams in more than 25% 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 in the BusinessWeek CEO Forum, HSM World Business Forum, TED and World Economic Forum at Davos.

Education

VG received his doctorate from the Harvard Business School and was awarded the Robert Bowne Prize for the best thesis proposal. He also received his MBA with distinction from the Harvard Business School where he was included in the Dean’s Honor List. Prior to this, VG received his Chartered Accountancy degree in India where he was awarded the President’s Gold Medal for obtaining the first rank nationwide

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

COVID-19’s Impact on the Future of Higher Education: What University Leaders Should Be Thinking About Now

As Winston Churchill said, “never waste a good crisis”. The leadership of our universities must look long and deep, beyond COVID-19, and come to grips with the choices that they must make and position their institutions for greatest impact in the decades to come. The time for such strategic conversations is now, by using data from the current forced online learning experiment. All of us—whether we’re parents, youngsters, policy makers, or citizens—are deeply concerned about the future of higher education.

Innovation Execution

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.

Reverse Innovation

In this presentation, VG introduces the idea of developing new business models 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.

Winning in Emerging Markets Through Innovation

The rise of emerging markets, such as India and China, mark a new phase of globalization, and, to date, most multinational companies have targeted only the top of the pyramid in these markets — the wealthiest 10 percent. The real potential lies in unlocking the other 90 percent. That is easier said than done.

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.

Strategy Is Innovation: The 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. This presentation is based on 3 Box Thinking to Strategy: Box 1 (Manage the Present), Box 2 (Selectively Forget the Past), Box 3 (Create the Future). Box 1 is about Efficiency and Boxes 2/3 are about Innovation. This presentation focuses on the 3 Box thinking to strategy.