How to Develop Affordable Innovations - Jagdish Sheth

Innovation obsession is sweeping the world — but innovation alone is not enough. To drive real growth, companies must learn to innovate affordably. This course introduces four proven strategies for developing low-cost innovations that can scale globally: reverse innovation, plug-and-play modularization, proactive disruption, and targeting base-of-the-pyramid markets. Learners will explore how the economics of the digital age, where marginal cost approaches zero, fundamentally change the innovation calculus, and why emerging markets like China, India, and Africa are now the proving grounds for the world's most transformative products. Through examples ranging from GE's portable EKG machines to IKEA's modular furniture to the Tata Nano car, this course demonstrates that affordability is not a constraint on innovation — it is its most powerful driver.