Soumitra Dutta named new Johnson dean

Soumitra Dutta, a professor of business and technology and founder and faculty director of a new media and technology innovation lab at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, will become the eleventh dean of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University effective July 1, 2012, Cornell President David J. Skorton announced today.

Soumitra Dutta: Scaling new heights

Academics of Indian origin such as Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria, and Chicago Booth Dean Sunil Kumar are scaling the professional ladder in the west. In appointing Dutta, Johnson becomes the first major business school in the United States to hire a dean from a business school outside the country. INSEAD, with campuses in Fontainebleau, France; Singapore, and Abu Dhabi, UAE, is one of the top-ranked graduate business schools worldwide.

Dutta himself has served visiting professorships in Haas School at UC Berkeley, Oxford Internet Institute at University of Oxford, and Judge School at University of Cambridge in England, as well as advised several governments with their national information and innovation policies and consulted with leading international organisations.

“Professor Dutta’s appointment is a natural fit with Johnson’s increasingly global outlook,” said Skorton. “He has expertise in new and emerging media, he has studied the conditions that promote innovation and he has extensive experience on the international stage. Among other qualities, these prepare him well to oversee the education of our next-generation business leaders and entrepreneurs. Johnson students, Cornellians who take courses at Johnson and, in the very near future, aspiring entrepreneurs at our new tech campus in New York City will benefit from this appointment.” Dutta received a B Tech. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology and an MS in business administration, an MS in computer science and a PhD in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley.

India's invisible innovation challenge

True or false: When it comes to innovation, the developed world has a distinct advantage over emerging markets? If you believe this, you’ll be surprised to read new research from London Business School professors Nirmalya Kumar and Phanish Puranam that turns this long-held assumption on its head.

In their new book INDIA INSIDE: The Emerging Innovation Challenge to the West, Nirmalya Kumar and Phanish Puranam, who are also co-directors of the School’s Aditya Birla Centre, make clear that for certain kinds of innovation, the long-held monopoly held by the developed world is over. As a result, the authors argue, it’s now time for Western countries to follow the East’s lead—and in particular, India’s lead—in adopting different processes and developing new responses to increasing shifts in the world market.

But one thing is for sure: India’s invisible-innovation challenge will need a response from Western multinationals and policy makers alike. In India Inside, Professors Kumar and Puranam deliver a much needed wake-up call to thinkers and companies in the developed world.

According to the authors, substantial innovation is taking place in India, but in a form that is invisible to consumers around the world. This innovation takes a rich variety of forms—from novel B2B offerings and R&D services outsourcing to process improvement discoveries and fresh approaches to management.

The authors argue that despite some challenges, India has emerged as the global ‘invisible’ innovation hub. Four new concepts help demonstrate this:

• Global segmented R&D delivery model: How innovative and creative tasks are increasingly being off-shored to India
• Injection of intelligence: How over-qualified people on what were considered dead end jobs produces product innovations in India
• Sinking skill ladder: How by outsourcing the bottom end of the value chain to India, the West will be forced to offshore more strategic and creative activities in the future
• Browning of the TMT: How multinational corporations must transform composition of their global leadership teams as R&D and markets move to India and China

Kumar and Puranam believe that India’s emergence as a global innovation hub has important implications for the developed world. For Western multinationals it means internal stress around talent and the makeup of top executive teams. For Western policy-makers it means the potential loss of dominance in creative, innovative, and high-value-added work. The book provides several potential responses and recommendations for adapting to this new norm.

Through research and extensive interviews with India-based executives from companies like AstraZeneca, GE, Infosys, Intel, and Wipro, INDIA INSIDE presents a clear-eyed view of the challenges and opportunities facing multinationals seeking new sources of innovation in the future.