When you hear that Senior Associate Dean Bhaskar Chakravorti headed McKinsey’s Innovation and Global Forces practices and painted his office Fletcher Orange before the start of the term, you know he means business. On January 27th, Fletcher’s International Business Center hosted a meet and greet event for Sr. Associate Dean Chakravorti where he presented his views on innovation in emerging markets and answered questions from students and faculty. In his informative and engaging presentation, Sr. Associate Dean Chakravorti not only demonstrated his passion for innovation, but also viscerally showed his excitement to be at Fletcher, owing to its world-class resources, faculty, and students.
Setting himself apart from conventional speakers, Sr. Associate Dean Chakravorti engaged the capacity crowd with a multimedia presentation. In the first of three video vignettes, Sr. Associate Dean Chakravorti presented statistics on how business is changing. He indicated that we find ourselves in the first decade in more than 200 years in which growth will come from emerging countries. After racing through recent innovations and changes, the video ended with a challenge to Fletcher: “This is where you’ve been. This is where you’re going. Are you ready?” Without missing a cue, Sr. Associate Dean Chakravorti affirmed that Fletcher is ready, thanks to the multi-disciplinary engagement unfolding in classrooms and hallways every day.
Sr. Associate Dean Chakravorti then spoke about innovating on innovation. He noted that complex organizations are notoriously bad at innovating because of three main challenges. First is the Goldilocks Planet problem. This involves finding habitable planets that are not too far away from or too close to a hot star in other galaxies. Just as finding this zone is critical to enable humans to survive anywhere but Earth, a company must find a zone in which it can be close enough to the core to leverage the parent organization’s assets, but not so close that it gets wiped out by the sheer process of having to meet the financial requirements of the core.
The second challenge is that innovations emerge in an ecosystem of existing services and products. In an interconnected world, the process of displacing these incumbent services and products is made more challenging by the pervasive status quo.
Lastly, the size of complex organizations prevents them from easily adapting to changes and usually leads them to channel resources earmarked for innovation toward micro trends instead of macro trends. Sr. Associate Dean Chakravorti believes that only a Sputnik moment can inspire action upon macro trends. Only after organizations suffer a crisis do they realize that macro trends have caught up and begin to address them.
Before playing his second video, Sr. Associate Dean Chakravorti recounted an anecdote of when he negotiated the development of a pan-African fiber optic network. His presentation in South Africa fell on deaf ears because Nelson Mandela had just returned from Malaysia, where he had formed a close bond with the prime minister. Consequently, the South African administration wanted only to know how to establish a direct link between Johannesburg and Kuala Lumpur. As a result of this experience, Sr. Associate Dean Chakravorti stresses the importance of disciplinary depth and the ability to transcend multiple fields. At Fletcher, he will strive to prepare graduates to address similarly complex scenarios.
In line with his message that innovations will come from emerging markets, Sr. Associate Dean Chakravorti’s second video was an ad for Cadbury Bytes. The inherent problems posed by manufacturing chocolate in developing countries with steamy temperatures led Cadbury India to develop a product made of melted chocolate and with a salty cracker coating. Cadbury India thus solved the problems of refrigeration and distribution as well as cannibalization since the new product is both salty and sweet. Sr. Associate Dean Chakravorti noted that successful firms are those that connect unmet needs in emerging markets with local technologies, talent, and ideas to produce new products that can be sold in both the developing and developed worlds.
The last video of the evening depicted the rise and fall of PlayPumps International, a venture that sought to harness children’s energy to power merry-go-rounds capable of pumping water from deep below the ground. Though initially highly successful, the firm failed to consider all the challenges that would arise during the lifecycle of these pumps such as their affordability (PlayPumps’ systems cost cost four times as much as traditional pump systems), repairs, and the supply chain necessary to service the pumps. Unsurprisingly, the company eventually went out of business. The sobering case prompted Sr. Associate Dean Chakravorti to reiterate why a Fletcher education is critical to solving problems the world faces today. People not only need to know how to conduct business, they also need to understand law, cultural norms, economics, and history in order to effect change.
Throughout his presentation, Sr. Associate Dean Chakravorti exuded charisma, energy, and intelligence—traits that Fletcher students and faculty also radiate. With his infectious passion for his position, the school, and its students, Sr. Associate Dean Chakravorti makes it exciting to be at Fletcher right now.
Kim Liao, F11