Dr. Simone Ahuja is the founder of Blood Orange, a marketing and strategy consultancy with special expertise in emerging markets and innovation, and content production capabilities. Blood Orange uses an agile, cost efficient content production process built on principles learned through extensive work in India, including jugaad. Simone recently developed, produced, and directed the television series Indique—Big Ideas from Emerging India, for which she explored how innovation in India drives socioeconomic development.

On the show, Dr. Ahuja discussed Jugaad innovation and what it is: “being resourceful and leveraging ingenuity… the idea that when you run into a problem, it can be solved by leveraging whatever you have on hand.” She gave examples of Jugaad Innovation from her work in India and other grassroots examples, including a man who created a bike that converted shock from bumps on the wheels into power for the bike. Dr. Ahuja then discussed how Jugaad can be seen in the US, using GE health as an example. She answered questions on how to overcome and understand obstacles involved with Jugaad innovation, and how to adjust Jugaad Innovation to work in the US.

Scott D. Anthony is the Managing Partner of Innosight. He received a BA in economics summa cum laude from Dartmouth College and an MBA with high distinction from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar. Scott has written extensively about innovation, authoring books and writing for Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review. He is the author of the forthcoming book The First Mile: A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas Into the Market (Harvard Business Review Press, May 2014). Scott is a featured speaker on topics of innovation and growth, delivering keynote addresses on five continents, and appearing on Good Morning America, Channel News Asia, CNBC, and FOX Business. He served on the Board of Directors of Media General (NYSE: MEG) and MediCorp. Scott chairs the investment committee for IDEAS Ventures. Prior to joining Innosight, Scott was a senior researcher with Clayton Christensen.

On Innovation Navigation, Anthony discussed his latest book, The First Mile: A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas Into the Market, and how to get ventures through the “first mile” of innovation: taking a plan from paper to realizing a proven, scaleable business model. He described the first mile of The Village Laundry Service, a mobile laundry service in India, and the problems that prevented its initial scalability. Anthony also compared different schools of thought surrounding innovation techniques and what is best for different circumstances. He talked about DEFT, a framework for bringing structure to management uncertainty which includes comprehensive documentation, evaluation, focus on the biggest risks in ideas, and vigorous testing.

Listen to Scott talk about his DEFT framework:

Listen to Clip

Andrew Laffoon is the co-founder and CEO of Mixbook, a venture-backed startup founded in 2006. Mixbook is a free online service for creating and sharing personalized photo books that has rapidly grown to over 3 million users. Mixbook’s award-winning app, Mosaic, allows users to create a photo book from their Apple/Android device in just a few minutes. Previously, Andrew worked for two years in marketing, development and support for a venture-backed software startup. At age 15, Andrew founded his first startup – a web consulting business which he ran for 8 years. Andrew received a BS in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley and a certificate from the Berkeley Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. Laffoon’s segment began with an introduction to Mixbook, Mosaic, and Montage, the three product offerings from Mixbook Inc. He discussed the company’s growth and innovation timeline so far, including pivots and how they have been able to scale. He talked about how Mixbook Inc. is growing into the next phase of growing the company and described building out the management team. In addition, Laffoon described how he approaches managing different types of employees and how Mixbook Inc. strives to maintain a culture of innovation by focusing on user interaction, design, and producing the best product on the market.

Edwin Keh is a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He received his BA from Whittier College and attended graduate school at Claremont College’s Drucker School. He has worked with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Payless Shoesource International, Donna Karan International, Country Road Australia, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Structure. He managed a consulting group for supply chain, manufacturing, and product design. He has done extensive humanitarian group with NGOs in Burma, Thailand, the Philippines, Laos, and China. Until 2010, Mr. Keh was the Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President of Wal-Mart Global Procurement.

On the show, Mr. Keh talked a lot about his course at Wharton, bringing students to China to see a variety of companies and how they operate. In addition to a great cultural experience and introduction to how business is done in China, this experience is excellent for returning visitors, as certain companies remain dominant while others do not. He discussed how China is no long a place of simple cheap labor with a direct pipeline of manufactured goods to the American marketplace. Now, China has become more expensive, successful firms there are becoming “fuzzy’ and adding design capabilities as well as selling in the growing internal market in China. Today, the former China-US pipeline has become a complex spiderweb with goods, capital, and ideas flowing in many directions and to many markets.

Marla Capozzi is the leader of McKinsey’s Strategy and Global Innovation Practice, and is also an adjunct lecturer at Babson College. She received her MBA with honors from Babson. She led product development at the Lotus/IBM Innovation Center, as well as worked as a change management consultant and communications specialist for a defense contractor prior to joining McKinsey. Ms. Capozzi has written in Fortune/CNN, McKinsey Quarterly, MIT Sloan Management Review, Strategic Finance, and Banking Strategies. She lectures at NYU Stern, MIT, Emory, London Business School, and Babson, and has been named to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s Council for Innovation.

On Tuesday, Ms. Capozzi discussed innovation at scale in great depth. She talked about how a firm can succeed through the strategy and vision of its senior management, who must set clear goals for the entire organization to follow, so that the governance team can hold individuals accountable and ensure success. In addition, Ms. Capozzi spoke about her successful strategy of “war gaming” at firms, meaning that managers should insist on considering the external world – reviewers, distributors, consumers, etc – early and often in the innovation process, to make sure that the ultimate product is the one that will be most successful.

Beth Kowitt is a writer for FORTUNE. She has a B.A. in sociology and English from Bowdoin College and an M.S. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Prior to working for FORTUNE, she wrote for Platts Oilgram News. Now, she focuses upon careers and consumer goods and services, while covering a broad range of topics. She has received a Sidney Award from New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks and her 2010 story “Inside Trader Joe’s” was named one of the best business stories of the year by Longform.org.

On the show, she focused upon her latest work, a series of stories investigating Whole Foods Markets, their success, and how the recent stock price drop is overblown. She talked about how the store is unique in that it is a firm unafraid of taking a stance on topics – for instance it has a list of ingredients that it simply won’t sell – but it also faces pressure from hard-line vegans that believe the store should be strictly vegan itself. Whole Foods faces challenges, as more and more traditional grocers are offering organic products, while smaller health foods stores offer higher-priced products but more purely cater to a health food crowd. Ms. Kowitt discussed how Whole Foods is up to this challenge, as it has made itself into a store that is more affordable that many health stores, though it hasn’t significantly advertised this yet, while also offering better quality food, a different shopping and eating experience, and locally unique stores, all of which appeals to customers more.

Eben Upton is the founder of Raspberry Pi foundation and Technical Director and ASIC architect for Broadcom. He received his BA in physics and engineering at the University of Cambridge, his PhD at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, and his executive MBA from the Cambridge Judge Business School. He was the Director of Studies in Computer Science at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he invented the Raspberry Pi computer.

On Innovation Navigation, Upton introduced his product – the Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized computer designed for students and children to learn computer science on, using the open source operating system Linux. He had originally designed the product with the goal of putting 1,000 units in students’ hands, but has already sold millions. He talked about the challenges of innovating on the product while maintaining the community of users and contributors to the open source, not-for-profit project. It is a careful process, but a lot of focus is upon improving the product while not alienated the thousands of core users that make the community fantastic.

Geoff Gibbins is Lead Inventor at ?What If!. He attended the University of London and the University of Oxford, and has previously worked in strategy consulting. At ?What If! he works with pharmaceutical, travel, financial services, and other companies, helping to discover new perspectives on commercial strategies.

On their visit to Innovation Navigation, Paul and Gibbins called innovation a “contact sport,” designed to change behavior and motivate growth. They illuminated differences in innovation challenges in developed markets – which are called to reinvent existing business models – and developing markets – which are still creating brands and approaches from scratch (which may in turn be carried back to developed markets for additional advantage). They advised managers of innovation to ask for the right rigor at the right time – recognize that a five-year P&L isn’t necessary the first time an idea is pitched, and a more flexible, nimble approach will allow more high-potential ideas to flourish.

Neena Paul is a Director and U.S. Business Leader at ?What If!. She has previously worked with Merkley & Partners. At ?What If!, Ms. Paul works to help firms achieve disruptive breakthroughs through human passion as well as provocative thinking and process agility. Her diversity of experience includes work with healthcare and food companies, as well as with the United Nations Development Program.

On their visit to Innovation Navigation, Paul and Gibbins called innovation a “contact sport,” designed to change behavior and motivate growth. They illuminated differences in innovation challenges in developed markets – which are called to reinvent existing business models – and developing markets – which are still creating brands and approaches from scratch (which may in turn be carried back to developed markets for additional advantage). They advised managers of innovation to ask for the right rigor at the right time – recognize that a five-year P&L isn’t necessary the first time an idea is pitched, and a more flexible, nimble approach will allow more high-potential ideas to flourish.

Ron Adner has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and a PhD and an MA from the Wharton School. He was the Akzo-Nobel Fellow of Strategic Management at INSEAD prior to joining the faculty at the Tuck School. Mr. Adner has written extensively; he is the author of the groundbreaking book The Wide Lens, has written articles in numerous academic journals such as Management Science, Organization Science and others, and has published articles in Harvard Business Review, MIT/Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, The Atlantic, Fast Company, Forbes, Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He has been honored with awards both for his research and his teaching, and his work centers on the ‘innovation ecosystems’ and value-creating interactions and relationships. Adner highlighted the importance of an innovation ecosystem in his conversation with Dave Robertson – innovators, he said, must ask themselves about both co-innovation (“Does anyone else in the value chain need to innovate in order for my innovation to matter?”) and adoption risk (“Who must buy into my innovation’s proposition before my end consumer can use it, and what incentives do they need to participate?”) He advised mapping the ecosystem thoroughly and thinking carefully about the proof of concept metric that makes the most sense, which may vary from organization to organization. Electric cars and education reform, he said, are great examples of areas where innovation has to consider the ecosystem before new products and services can take off.

Ron returned to Innovation Navigation in December as part of the Dave’s Favorite Authors series, to discuss his book The Wide Lens. He spoke about co-innovators as a management problem: manager’s need to be thinking not just “how to make a product that delights customers,” which is what Sony does so well, but “who else needs to buy into this product to make the ecosystem work,” which is what Apple asked, and why the iPod was successful and Sony’s MP3 player did not take off. Another key issue is whether a company wants to be first or late, which is really a question of whether co-innovators need to come onboard before the product can succeed.