"Developing Economies" overtaking Developed Nations with Innovations.....

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In the 80s’ US car producers were shock to find that Japan had replaced the United States as the world’s leading carmaker. How the Japanese beat the Americans on both price and reliability and how did they manage to produce new models so quickly. The answer was not industrial policy or state subsidies but business innovation. The Japanese had invented a new system of making things that was quickly dubbed “lean manufacturing”.

Developing countries are becoming hotbeds of business innovation in much the same way as Japan did from the 1950s onwards. They are coming up with new products and services that are dramatically cheaper than their Western equivalents: $3,000 cars, $300 computers and $30 mobile phones that provide nationwide service for just 2 cents a minute. They are reinventing systems of production and distribution, and they are experimenting with entirely new business models.

Why are countries that were until recently associated with cheap hands now becoming leaders in innovation? The most obvious reason is that the local companies are dreaming bigger dreams. Vietnam or Cambodia—they are relentlessly climbing up the value chain. Emerging-market champions have not only proved highly competitive in their own backyards, they are also going global themselves. There are now around 21,500 multinationals based in the emerging world. The best of these, such as India’s Bharat Forge in forging, China’s BYD in batteries and Brazil’s Embraer in jet aircraft, are as good as anybody in the world. The number of companies from Brazil, India, China or Russia on the Financial Times 500 list more than quadrupled in 2006-08, from 15 to 62. Brazilian top 20 multinationals more than doubled their foreign assets in a single year, 2006.

At the same time Western multinationals are investing ever bigger hopes in emerging markets. They regard them as sources of economic growth and high-quality brainpower, both of which they desperately need.

China produces 75,000 people with higher degrees in engineering or computer science and India 60,000 every year.

The world’s biggest multinationals are becoming increasingly happy to do their research and development in emerging markets. Companies in the Fortune 500 list have 98 R&D facilities in China and 63 in India. Some have more than one. General Electric’s health-care arm has spent more than $50m in the past few years to build a vast R&D centre in India’s Bangalore, its biggest anywhere in the world. Cisco is splashing out more than $1 billion on a second global headquarters—Cisco East—in Bangalore, now nearing completion. Microsoft’s R&D centre in Beijing is its largest outside its American headquarters in Redmond.

Knowledge-intensive companies such as IT specialists and consultancies have hugely stepped up the number of people they employ in developing countries. For example, a quarter of Accenture’s workforce is in India.

Both Western and emerging-country companies have also realised that they need to try harder if they are to prosper in these booming markets. It is not enough to concentrate on the Gucci and Mercedes crowd; they have to learn how to appeal to the billions of people who live outside Shanghai and Bangalore, from the rising middle classes in second-tier cities to the farmers in isolated villages. That means rethinking everything from products to distribution systems. These islands of success are surrounded by a sea of problems, which have defeated some doughty companies. Yahoo! and eBay retreated from China, and Google too has recently backed out from there and moved to Hong Kong. Black & Decker, America’s biggest toolmaker, is almost invisible in India and China, the world’s two biggest construction sites.

But the opportunities are equally extraordinary. The potential market is huge: populations are already much bigger than in the developed world and growing much faster ( chart1), and in both China and India hundreds of millions of people will enter the middle class in the coming decades. The economies are set to grow faster too ( chart 2). Few companies suffer from the costly “legacy systems” that are common in the West. Brainpower is relatively cheap and abundant: in China over 5m people graduate every year and in India about 3m, respectively four times and three times the numbers a decade ago.

This combination of challenges and opportunities is producing a fizzing cocktail of creativity. Because so many consumers are poor, companies have to go for volume. But because piracy is so commonplace, they also have to keep upgrading their products. Again the similarities with Japan in the 1980s are striking. Toyota and Honda took to “just-in-time” inventories and quality management because land and raw materials were expensive. In the same way emerging-market companies are turning problems into advantages.

Until now it had been widely assumed that globalisation was driven by the West and imposed on the rest. Muscular emerging-market champions such as India’s ArcelorMittal in steel and Mexico’s Cemex in cement are gobbling up Western companies. Brainy ones such as Infosys and Wipro are taking over office work. And consumers in developing countries are getting richer faster than their equivalents in the West.

Old assumptions about innovation are also being challenged. People in the West like to believe that their companies cook up new ideas in their laboratories at home and then export them to the developing world, which makes it easier to accept job losses in manufacturing. But this is proving less true by the day. Non-Western companies are becoming powerhouses of innovation in everything from telecoms to computers. [ Our company, a world-class rig builder,   has produced quite alot of innovative ideas in the IQC intiative producing feasible "short-cuts" and leading to more productivity and output and thus saving quite a substantial sums each year in building major offshore oil rigs, and it is such motion of getting all the thinking hats together coming out with workable ideas, some could have been overlooked to be day-to-day chore but when look deeper, you could save few hundred thousands especially in rig building business involving the need to take the "economy-of-scale" advantage ]

Re-invent innovative ideas

The very nature of innovation is having to be rethought. Most people in the West equate it with technological breakthroughs, embodied in revolutionary new products that are taken up by the elites and eventually trickle down to the masses. But many of the most important innovations consist of incremental improvements to products and processes aimed at the middle or the bottom of the income pyramid: eg.Wal-Mart’s exemplary supply system or Dell’s application of just-in-time production to personal computers.

The emerging world will undoubtedly make a growing contribution to breakthrough innovations. It has already leapfrogged ahead of the West in areas such as mobile money (using mobile phones to make payments) and online games. Microsoft’s research laboratory in Beijing has produced clever programs that allow computers to recognise handwriting or turn photographs into cartoons. Huawei, a Chinese telecoms giant, has become the world’s fourth-largest patent applicant. But the most exciting innovations—and the ones this report will concentrate on—are of the Wal-Mart and Dell variety: smarter ways of designing products and organising processes to reach the billions of consumers who are just entering the global market.

China and India say their country’s current economic situation is good (chart 3), expect conditions to improve further and think their children will be better off than they are. This is a region that sees opportunities in every difficulty rather than difficulties in every opportunity.

Now the emerging markets are developing their own distinctive management ideas, and Western companies will increasingly find themselves learning from their rivals. People who used to think of the emerging world as a source of cheap labour must now recognise that it can be a source of disruptive innovation also.