Karan Girotra is Paul Dubrule Chaired Professor of Sustainable Development and a professor of Technology and Operations Management at INSEAD and author of the bestseller “The Risk Driven Business Model”. Karan’s research has examined how new business models are disrupting centuries-old ways of doing things in a variety of industries while creating game changing opportunities for business, society and governments. He has looked extensively at new business models in clean transportation, retailing, urban living and sustainable sourcing.

Karan is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review and a frequent TV and radio guest having appeared on CNBC, First Business News and many widely syndicated radio shows. His research has appeared in top academic journals and has been featured extensively in the business press including the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, etc. He has given Keynote addresses at the World Knowledge Forum and for corporations such as McKinsey, Johnson and Johnson, Medtronic, ABB, Bayer, amongst others.

In addition to his academic work, Karan was one of the founders of Terrapass Inc., which the New York Times identified as one of the most noteworthy ideas of 2005.

Karan blogs about business model innovation at http://www.renaissanceinnovator.com and is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review bloggers network. He is represented by theBrighSight group for speaking engagements.

http://faculty.insead.edu/karan-girotra/

On Innovation Navigation, Karan spoke about how business model innovation is truly distinct from product or service innovation – it isn’t using an electric-arc furnace instead of a blast furnace to make lower-cost steel, because you’re still making steel and selling it to the same customers, business model innovation is about rethinking where revenues come from and costs are, and thereby what margins can be. He gave the example of Dell, who redefined the computer business by making computers on-demand, it may have similar revenues and perhaps somewhat higher costs, but it changed forever the risks of doing business. Dell gained a working capital advantage because customers paid up-front, but they paid their suppliers to build those computers as much as two months later, giving them ‘free’ capital for two months at a time, a tremendous advantage! One innovation style he discusses is to change decision responsibility, such as moving from a traditional model of the manager deciding what an employee decides to do with his or her time to one in which an employee decides what to do with a certain percentage of their time, such as how Google has its employees do whatever they’d like to work on for 20% of their time.