Reverse Innovation

This chapter introduces reverse innovation. Reverse innovation contests the assumption that innovation emerges in the West and Global North and then flows to the Global South and so called ‘developing countries.’ Instead, it recognises that the Global South and low-income countries can also be an important site of idea generation and innovation itself, reversing the direction of flow back to the Global North. In this chapter, we outline the emergence of reverse innovation, the conditions fuelling its emergence and its mobilisation by Western Multinational Corporations, as well as by theorists and practitioners in interdisciplinary health spaces. We will learn that reverse innovation can simultaneously be a growth strategy for Multinational Corporations- an extractive mode of organising which positions lower-income countries as sites to incubate experimental innovation for gain in higher-income countries -, as well as an opportunity to recognise the expertise and insight of countries in the Global South in more equitable and power-sharing ways. In its initial framing reverse innovation overly focused on technological solutions and, arguably, exacerbated existing global divides. We will explore reverse innovation’s shift towards thinking in terms of ‘global innovation flows’ which foreground mutual learning between diverse publics, actors, organisations, and sectors. Reverse innovation, in this more transformative framing, helps us to recognise, with humility and empathy, that expertise, knowledge and understanding are always widely distributed.