A unified innovation approach to emerging markets: Imperatives to play and win the game

Previous research shows a plethora of overlapping and interrelated innovation approaches to understand the bottom of the pyramid customer needs and markets specifications. This research attempts to (1) identify the key factors that make a product relevant to be considered as an innovation for emerging markets (2) and establish relative importance of key factors for product managers while conceptualizing a new product for emerging markets. In the first part, the study assembles the list of characteristics from the selected innovation theories revolving around emerging markets. Subsequently the identified characteristics are clustered into eight key factors using semantic similarities scores and Ward’s clustering method. An analytical hierarchy process method is employed to obtain the priorities of these eight key factors. The study concludes with a Unified Innovation Framework which presents the overarching innovation approach for emerging markets and provides a common definition for a product considered relevant for emerging market. The results show high prioritization given to cost effective, easy to use and problem centric as compared to the sustainability, no-frills, resourceful, breakthrough and fast-to-market factors by product managers. However, the paper acknowledges that the prioritization results are subject to change given different motivation behind the various theories. Finally the paper proposes that, the eight key factors required factors to “play in” emerging markets would not change, but factors to “win in” can change based on other aspects such as sector, motivation, innovation flows and government policies.