Ravi Ramamurti, now a professor at Northeastern University, left India in the year 1977 to earn his doctorate in the subject of business administration. He stepped in the University as a faculty, and for 40 years there, he worked hard to do something that will help his people back in his home country.
“I’m from India. I came here and wanted to work on the problems I saw in India, but these weren’t problems that were interesting to most university business schools at the time,” he said.
He soon became the founder and then the director of Northeastern’s own Center for Emerging Markets. He was inspired by the D’Amore-McKim School of Business model and based his Center on it. “It occurred to me that a lot of people on Earth were facing problems we didn’t face in the United States,” he admitted. “And I think part of me felt guilty for leaving India to come here to study.”
Founded in the year 2007, it became the most sought-after place to study the economics of not-so-developed countries, including Brazil, China, and India. Not only was this one of the first ventures in the study of emerging markets but also it hosts an annual lecture series, organised by the members.
Ramamurti, through this, got to know how the tide of the global market is turning. Where less-developed countries were seen as a liability, they are now coming up with their own fantastic inventions, with as fewer expenses and time, as compared to the developed ones. For example, open-heart surgery, in the U.S. can easily go up to $200,000, as put forth by the Mayo Clinic. “Open-heart surgery in India is around $3,000. These are countries that have had to find creative ways to deliver healthcare,” Ramamurti said.
This is exactly what Ramamurti describes in detail, in his book, ‘Reverse Innovation in Health Care: How to Make Value-Based Delivery Work’, co-written with Vijay Govindarajan, the author of New York Times Bestseller. The book argues about how people in the US would actually benefit from India’s innovative ideas.
At the bottom of all this, he is pretty proud of his Center, which helped the world to focus more on the emerging markets. His journey was quite adventurous and made me think about the resemblance between his journey and that of Robinson Crusoe’s. “Sometimes it’s lonely and scary to be out front. But that’s how you find what’s next. That’s how you innovate.”
Pranjali Wakde