For decades, innovation has largely been viewed as a one-way pipeline: conceived in wealthy markets, built for affluent consumers, and then adapted, simplified, and stripped down to fit the rest of the world. Think of the iPhone. Or breakthrough drugs and medical technologies developed for wealthy healthcare systems, then adapted for low-income markets.

But what if we've been looking at the map upside down all along?

What if breakthrough innovation doesn't emerge from abundance, but from constraint?

Some of the world's toughest markets operate with tighter budgets, thinner infrastructure, and little tolerance for products that fail to deliver tangible value. Designing within such constraints forces a different kind of innovation, one that delivers more value with fewer resources from day one.

Increasingly, innovations born under these conditions are not staying local. They are traveling across borders and moving upstream into wealthier markets, challenging long-held assumptions about where innovation begins.

That is the central premise of Global by Design, the new book by MIT engineering professor Amos Winter and strategy scholar Vijay Govindarajan. Their argument challenges organizations to stop viewing emerging markets as destinations for adapted innovation and instead see them as proving grounds for solutions capable of succeeding anywhere.

At its core, Global by Design asks a deceptively simple set of questions: What problem are we trying to solve? For whom? And why does the current solution fall short?

In an exclusive conversation with ai:sight, Winter discusses why emerging markets are becoming engines of global innovation, how organizations can build better solutions by designing with stakeholders instead of for them, and where human ingenuity continues to outperform AI in the innovation process.

Solving for scarcity

One of the book's most compelling ideas is that scarcity isn't merely a constraint. It can be a catalyst for innovation. Whether it is healthcare in rural China or affordable shaving products in India, constraints force innovators to rethink assumptions and build impactful solutions.

Why should innovation flow upstream rather than downstream?

I'd say the big indicators for why it needs to happen, which are also the reasons behind why we wrote this book, are first the economic opportunity: that emerging markets are growing so much faster than established markets – about twice as fast. And then even faster if you look just at China and India.

So, if you're a multinational company and you want to create rapid growth in your company, you want to look towards emerging markets.

The second reason is the humanitarian challenge. When it comes to solutions that really impact human health and well-being, be they around water and sanitation, energy, housing, and healthcare, even though solutions to those problems exist in wealthier markets, they have not, in many cases, transferred over to more constrained markets.

Constrained markets force you to innovate and create high-value solutions. And if you can achieve that at a much lower price point, you likely have a multi-market, global opportunity for that product where you can potentially disrupt wealthy-market offerings too.

Why are emerging markets fertile ground for innovation?

Well, I think it's really driven by the phrase: "Necessity is the mother of invention.”

And companies that are really striving to grow are also in that "necessity-invention" situation. As they look around, they'll see the greatest growth potential in emerging markets.

Designing with stakeholders

The book's central premise is simple: understand the problem, understand the people affected by it, and understand why existing solutions fall short. For Winter, breakthrough innovation starts when designers broaden their perspective, challenge their assumptions, and build alongside the stakeholders who will ultimately use, fund, make, and distribute a product.

Why design with stakeholders, not just for them?

The biggest lesson that we offer in the book is pushing innovators to actively broaden their perspective. If a designer like me suddenly has to design something for, say, a mother of five in India, well, that's a very different demographic than I'm from. And I'm ignorant of a lot of aspects of that user's life.

You have to recognize that you have ignorance, you have biases, you probably have assumptions, and you want to check yourself on those. The best way to do that is to try to see the world through the eyes of the many stakeholders you have to satisfy for a successful product.

Perspective is the most powerful tool a designer has.

Designs only fail because requirements are not satisfied. If you can see those requirements, you're much more likely to satisfy them and have a successful solution.

Amos Winter

MIT Professor and author

Designs only fail because requirements are not satisfied. If you can see those requirements, you're much more likely to satisfy them and have a successful solution.

Amos Winter

MIT Professor and author

What does this look like in practice?

That usually means go talk to them. We try to broaden our market-driven perspective, but we also need to broaden our technical viewpoint.

One example from the book is our work on drip irrigation systems, where we learned from the market that there was strong demand for lower pumping power to reduce energy costs. While we understood that from a market perspective, we achieved it through understanding the physics of how water flows through the irrigation system and how to reduce pressure to reduce pumping power. As a result, we designed devices that cut pumping power in half compared to traditional drip irrigation.

Bringing together market-driven socioeconomic insights with deep technical insights has been the recipe for every innovation I've done in my career.

What is the Three Merits Test?

What that comes down to is really understanding the value propositions of all your stakeholders that you need to satisfy to create a successful solution: Why would somebody invest in your innovation? Why would people be incentivized to adopt your product? Why would people be incentivized to make and sell your product?

Assessing the problem, innovation, and value merits convinces you that the problem you're tackling is worth solving and that the innovation will deliver value.

What we're trying to push innovators to do is take time to study the nails, understand the hammer's requirements, and then design it.

One idea in the book is that more ideas lead to better ideas. How can leaders encourage experimentation?

A challenge many innovators face is coming up with a good idea and wanting to run with it. I see this a lot in companies where the leader has an idea for an innovation direction and tells their engineers, "Do it." And that puts you in a risky situation because you're locking very prematurely onto an idea.

The other challenge here is that people, if you're talking about creating physical products, tend to think on a physical embodiment or conceptual level.

For example, if a farmer says, "I want a cheaper water pump to irrigate my field..." that immediately makes them think about designing water pumps. But the actual problem may be that they have less water than they used to. They're growing fewer crops. And so, the actual solution space is much bigger.

You can manipulate a lot of different variables. So going through a diligent design process forces you to evaluate many ideas. More ideas usually lead to better ideas because you can mix and match elements and kind of evolve them.

AI in innovation

AI is expanding what innovators can do, making it easier than ever to access knowledge, synthesize information, and accelerate decision-making. But while it is increasingly global in reach and capability, Winter argues that innovation still depends on uniquely human strengths, from intuition and lived experience to trust, empathy, and unconventional thinking.

Do you think AI is truly global by design?

I think AI is certainly being set up to try to be global by design, largely because of connectivity.

In my space, AI is an interesting topic because AI has greatly increased my power as an innovator. Now I have access to information in ways I didn't before, and I can aggregate data so quickly in ways I couldn't previously. I'm finding it's really helping me make creative decisions much faster as an engineer.

Where is AI still lacking?

AI is still very lacking, and I think it will be lacking for a long time in my physical product design space, for three primary reasons.

First, I have to gather and synthesize data that isn't formally recorded.

I have to go to different markets, talk to different stakeholders, understand their sentiments, understand their culture, understand how they allocate resources. That hasn't necessarily been written down anywhere. And then I have to synthesize that with math and physics. AI doesn't exactly do that, and it doesn't have access to that data yet.

The second reason is that, because I work in physical technology, a lot of "feel" is still important in what I do: what does the dirt feel like to farmers? How comfortable is a bicycle seat? That stuff can't all be broken down into data.

The final area of AI deficiency is rapport with people. I'll sit down in a person's kitchen, have a cup of tea with them, and talk about their life. We connect on these human experiences. There's a limit to the rapport-building that AI can have. But that's so important in product design.

I think there's a biological aspect to this too. Historically, people have innovated new solutions with very little prior data on similar solutions.

Where are humans vs AI most valuable?

I rely on AI to aggregate and synthesize a lot of existing data. That can be data I need to use to make a design decision, or it can be a routine task I know other people have done before, like setting up a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation with a standard structure.

I think humans still add huge value by coming up with ideas that have never been done before. We'll see that in a lot of industrial applications. People are going to be good at handling those situations for a long time because we're inherently good at that type of problem-solving.

Looking ahead

As leaders navigate AI, economic uncertainty, and shifting global markets, the fundamentals of innovation remain unchanged. The organizations that succeed will challenge their assumptions, broaden their perspective, and focus their creativity on solving meaningful problems.

What is the key takeaway for leaders from your book?

I think the book's biggest lesson is to actively broaden your perspective.

Take time to understand: What are your knowledge gaps? Who are your stakeholders, and what views of the world might they have? What are your assumptions? What are your biases? What are the limitations of your organization?

To broaden your perspective, one principle we talk about is being a tempered dreamer. That's a very powerful mindset. It's not that we're trying to limit people's creativity. We're trying to focus it. Ideas are cheap. Good ideas are valuable and hard to capture.

Where will the next major innovation come from?

Coming up with a way to provide water access to everybody in the world, where they have enough water not only to drink but also to do agriculture, I would say is one of the biggest challenges facing humanity. I think that may be the biggest innovation area.

The biggest innovation now we're living through is AI, which is very exciting, but it's interesting to reflect on what AI's impact is really going to be.