D'Amore-McKim School of Business Distinguished Professor Ravi Ramamurti founded the Northeastern University Center for Emerging Markets to fill a void he found when he came to America from India in 1977 to get his doctorate in business administration at Harvard Business School.
“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.
When he couldn't find what he was looking for – a way to study economies on the verge of development, he created The Center for Emerging Markets, a leading hub of research on economies that are not quite developed—the largest of which are in Brazil, Russia, India, and China. The Center boasts award-winning research, an annual lecture series, and more than 60 faculty fellows from across Northeastern University.
“Northeastern was among the early movers in examining emerging markets,” said Raj Echambadi, Dunton Family Dean of the D'Amore-McKim School of Business.
Ramamurti believes we're entering a period of reverse innovation, a time where groundbreaking work and advancements are being made by developing countries in innovative, less expensive ways.
Healthcare is becoming more innovative in developing countries, including India, where medical services are sometimes as low as one percent of the cost for the same service in the United States.
“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 topic is the focus of Ramamurti's new book, Reverse Innovation in Health Care: How to Make Value-Based Delivery Work, which he co-wrote with New York Times bestselling author Vijay Govindarajan.