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Technology Is Nothing If You Don 't Have The Right Capabilities

Decent Essays

“Technology is nothing if you don’t have the right capabilities to use that technology,” stated Farid Fezoua, the CEO of GE Healthcare Africa (Guest 25). As urbanization progresses and technology improves, new forms of innovation are being developed by humans around the world. Contrary to the usual approach of engineers to create and sell products for developed countries before developing countries (Winter and Govindarajan 82), reverse innovation does the opposite, forming goods based on the needs of developing countries and then improving the products for sale in developed countries (Simula, Hossain, and Halme 1567). Moreover, reverse innovation allows global companies to sell higher-quality goods for lower prices, increasing their competitive edge (Winter and Govindarajan 83). While reverse innovation requires a person to think broader and more differently (Simula, Hossain, and Halme 1567), cost, good-enough, and frugal innovations are dependent on the quantity of resources (Zeschky, Winterhalter, and Gassmann 20). These three resource-dependent innovations are different based on their varying costs and amounts of engineering required to create or adapt the products (Zeschky, Winterhalter, and Gassmann 21). First, cost innovations are items that achieve the same, or similar, function as Western products for lower prices; the reduced price tag is possible as a result of simultaneously utilizing better sourced, but lower priced, local resources (Zeschky, Winterhalter, and

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