Value for Money and for Many

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The value for money and for many approach also requires migration from traditional approaches to achieve unconventional results. The value for money and for many approach is fundamentally different from other approaches such as frugal engineering or reverse innovation. Frugal engineering is based on optimum and minimum utilization of resources to manufacture and deliver a product or a service. This is done through a resource constrained approach. Value for money and value for many approach focuses on delivering products and services to the resource constrained people and builds a price performance envelope to achieve the goals.

Similarly, reverse innovation as defined by Professor Govindrajan, who was a coauthor of a paper on reverse innovation with Jeffrey Immelt, explains reverse innovation as any innovation that is likely to be adopted first in the developing world and then move on to the developed world, exactly reverse of the current practice.

In this approach the emphasis is not necessarily on serving the “other four billion” as it is in the value for money and for many approach. The migration of products from this approach to the developed world is incidental as the focus is on fundamentally impacting the quality of life and experience of under-served customers.

The value for money and for many approach, however, derives its inspiration from “Gandhian Engineering” enunciated by one of the authors at a lecture on April 28, 2008 at the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering in Canberra. These initial thoughts were subsequently consolidated in a firm philosophy and a strategy. Subsequently, the Gandhian Engineering strategy has evolved into a more refined and broad framework of “more from less for more” encapsulating, among others, the strategies that will be developed and deployed by firms producing products and delivering services in the future.

Going forward, as the world takes on newer and bigger challenges of dealing with the resetting of the world economic order, protecting the planet for future generations, and creating an equitable global society, the value for money and for many approach seems to provide universal solutions.

India has demonstrated that such impossible challenges can be successfully converted into possible solutions and has paved the way for the rest of the world to follow.

RA Mashelkar is president of Global Research Alliance and chairman of National Innovation Foundation. Sushil Borde is innovation advisor at Reliance Innovation Leadership Centre, Reliance Industries Limited.