Need, Speed, and Greed

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Cheap and Cheerful

The dramatic rise of China, India, and other emerging-market powerhouses to date has been driven by cheap labor and low-cost manufacturing—but they are no longer content with being the world’s workshops. These countries are rapidly moving up the value chain with indigenous and often ingenious approaches to innovation. The resourceful engineers of the East need to be taken seriously, for their frugal innovations are starting to leapfrog their firms to the top of the global heap.

Developing economies are fertile terrain for breakthrough innovation. Booming middle classes with disposable income and rising expectations are creating lucrative markets. Legions of fresh graduates in technical disciplines such as software engineering ...