About the Authors
VIJAY GOVINDARAJAN (VG) is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on strategy and innovation. He is the Coxe Distinguished Professor of Management at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and a former Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School. He was the first Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant at General Electric. With GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt, he wrote the Harvard Business Review article “How GE Is Disrupting Itself,” which introduced the concept of “reverse innovation”—any innovation that is adopted first in the developing world. In November 2012 HBR named reverse innovation one of the “Great Moments in Management” in the last century. Govindarajan is the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Reverse Innovation and a two-time winner of the prestigious McKinsey Award for the best article published in HBR. In the latest Thinkers50 rankings, he is rated the #1 Indian Management Thinker.
Govindarajan has been identified as a leading management thinker by influential publications including Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, the London Times, and the Economist.
Prior to joining the faculty at Tuck, Govindarajan 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 Hall of Fame of the Academy of Management Journal and ranked by Management International Review as one of the Top 20 North American Superstars for research in strategy.
Govindarajan has worked with CEOs and top management teams in numerous Fortune 500 firms to discuss, challenge, and advance their thinking about strategy. His clients include: Boeing, Coca-Cola, Colgate, Deere, FedEx, GE, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, New York Times, Procter & Gamble, Sony, and Walmart. He has been a keynote speaker in the BusinessWeek CEO Forum, HSM World Business Forum, TEDx, and the World Economic Forum at Davos.
Govindarajan holds both a doctorate and an MBA (with distinction) from Harvard Business School. Prior to this, he received his chartered accountancy degree in India, where he was awarded the President’s Gold Medal by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India for obtaining the first rank nationwide.
RAVI RAMAMURTI is an expert on strategy and innovation in emerging markets. He is the University Distinguished Professor of International Business & Strategy at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business. He founded and heads the university’s Center for Emerging Markets. For more than thirty-five years he has studied the strategies of firms in and from emerging markets.
After earning his BSc degree (in physics) from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, India, Ramamurti obtained his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, where he received a Gold Medal for graduating at the top of his class. He holds a doctorate from Harvard Business School, where he was awarded a Dissertation Fellowship grant.
In recognition of his “outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business,” Ramamurti was elected a Fellow of the Academy of International Business in 2008. He was elected by members of the Academy of Management to serve on the board of its International Management Division (2003–2008).
Ramamurti has been a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and at MIT Sloan School of Management. He has also been a visiting professor at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, CEIBS Shanghai, and IMD Switzerland. He has been recognized globally for his thinking and teaching on strategy and innovation in emerging markets.
Along with doing research and consulting for firms and governments in more than twenty emerging markets, Ramamurti been an adviser to the United Nations, USAID, and the Fulbright Program. He was also principal adviser to the World Bank’s board on privatization and to The Economist Group for its online courses on emerging markets.
Ramamurti’s pioneering work on the strategies of multinationals from emerging markets, and how Western multinationals should respond to these new rivals, has led to the publication of six books in this area, including three with Cambridge University Press.
He has also published articles in leading academic journals, including the Academy of Management Review, Global Strategy Journal, Journal of International Business Studies, and Management Science, and in practitioner journals such as California Management Review and Harvard Business Review. His 2011 Global Strategy Journal article “Reverse Innovation, Emerging Markets, and Global Strategy,” coauthored with Vijay Govindarajan, won the 2012 EBS Universität prize for Best Article on Innovation Management, and in 2017 it won the inaugural prize for the Best Article published in GSJ.
Ramamurti is a frequent keynote speaker in academic and practitioner meetings and is quoted regularly in the business press. His consulting clients have included several public and private firms in the United States and around the world.